Marty Cooper and John Mitchell were not song-and-dance men, but sometimes it felt that way. The two engineers, executives in Motorola’s communications division, fed off each other’s energy during presentations, seeming to move and speak as one. And on Tuesday morning, April 3, 1973, at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan, Cooper and Mitchell performed the most important routine of their careers. They introduced the world’s first hand-held portable cell phone in front of about 50 newspaper reporters.

The real audience wasn’t the assembled press or even the public, who would read about this marvel in the next day’s papers. Cooper and Mitchell were actually putting on their technological buck-and-wing for the Federal Communications Commission, which seemed ready to hand AT&T yet another in a long series of telephone monopolies, this time over the nascent cellular-telephone business.

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