We're not past this 52-year cell-by date

It's just yesterday that we first got acquainted with the mobile phone. No, literally yesterday, 52 years ago. On April 3, 1973 - an era of bell-bottoms, disco, both Bobby and Zanjeer, and two months into what would be Dow's seventh-worst bear market in its history - Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first mobile phone call in the world with the words: 'Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone.' Cooper had called his chief competitor Joel Engel at Bell Labs to essentially taunt him from a Manhattan footpath in front of reporters. 'DynaTAC', that chunky, more-brick, less-iPhone ancestor, was developed by the now-96-yr-old Marty who, even then, realised what he had unleashed. He brought a redeveloped model into the market in 1983, and the rest, as they say, is this thing in your hand.

The phone itself was a marvel. It was - don't wait for it now, but in 1973... - cordless! Weighing in at nearly 2 kg (Cooper was then a sprightly 45-yr-old), this prototype could make calls and... well, that's it. No apps, no camera, no snake game, no WhatsApp University. Just raw, unadulterated mouth-to-ear communication. It took 10 hrs to charge for 30 mins of talk time. Which perhaps explains why over time as the tech improved, human communication has become more and more superfluous and off point.