Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the first handheld mobile phone call to Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.

Martin Cooper is an American engineer. He is a pioneer in the wireless communications industry, especially in radio spectrum management, with eleven patents in the field.

Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois. It was founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 and had been named Motorola since 1947. Many of Motorola's products had been radio-related communication equipment such as two-way radios, consumer walkie-talkies, cellular infrastructure, mobile phones, satellite communicators, pagers, as well as cable modems and semiconductors. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, Motorola was split into two independent public companies: Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility, on January 4, 2011.

The history of mobile phones covers mobile communication devices that connect wirelessly to the public switched telephone network.

Joel Stanley Engel is an American electrical engineer who made fundamental contributions to the development of cellular networks.

Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as Bell Labs, is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, the company operates several laboratories in the United States and around the world.