On April 3, 1973 — exactly 40 years from today — Motorola employee Marty Cooper made the first mobile phone call. 

Marty used a Motorola DynaTAC to call Bell Labs (then a division of AT&T), reportedly saying "I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end." 

The device that Marty used to place the call was a prototype which would later become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x.  It was the first commercially available mobile phone, and despite its meager specs for today's standards — it weighed 2.5 pounds and only had a one-line, text-only LED display — it cost a whopping $3,995. 

SEE ALSO: Cell-ebration!  40 Years of Cellphone History

The DynaTAC phone can be seen in action in several Hollywood films, including "Wall Street," where Gordon Gekko uses it to place a call from the beach, and "American Psycho," with Patrick Bateman using it to place a fake dinner reservation call. 

With today's phones being immeasurably more powerful and a lot cheaper, there's one quality the mobile phone has lost — exclusivity.  If that's what you're after, well, you can always get yourself one of these. 

Image courtesy of Flickr, dsearls