cell phone
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Puzzle #24 · June 25, 2025
Cell phone is named after biology, not circuitry. In 1947, Bell Labs engineers Douglas H. Ring and W. Rae Young looked at their network coverage maps and noticed something: the coverage areas resembled cells under a microscope. Hexagonal shapes. Living tissue patterns. They borrowed the word from biology to describe how radio towers would divide geographic space into overlapping ‘cells.’
Fast forward to April 3, 1973. Martin Cooper at Motorola made the first handheld cell phone call from a Manhattan sidewalk. He was holding the ‘DynaTAC’—the brick—and he called his rival Joel Engel at Bell Labs. It wasn't accidental. It was a competitive flex. He was announcing that Motorola had just beaten them to it. In this documentary on the first cell phone call you get a sense of the competitive nature with the rubbing it in your face Cooper does, but from today's perspective it's hard not to laugh at the size of that cell phone.
Fast forward to April 3, 1973. Martin Cooper at Motorola made the first handheld cell phone call from a Manhattan sidewalk. He was holding the ‘DynaTAC’—the brick—and he called his rival Joel Engel at Bell Labs. It wasn't accidental. It was a competitive flex. He was announcing that Motorola had just beaten them to it. In this documentary on the first cell phone call you get a sense of the competitive nature with the rubbing it in your face Cooper does, but from today's perspective it's hard not to laugh at the size of that cell phone.
Puzzle Appearances
The expression cell phone has appeared in 1 puzzle:
- Puzzle #24 on June 25, 2025
Rate of Appearance in English Language Print
Google's Ngram project shows how often a pair of words has appeared in print every year since the 1800's.
Data from Google Books Ngram Viewer. Licensed under CC BY 3.0.
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