The world's first mobile phone call was made in 1973 by Motorola employee Martin Cooper from the streets of New York City. He called his biggest rival. "I was calling Joel Engel who was my antagonist, my counterpart at AT&T, which at the time was the biggest company in the world. We were a little company in Chicago. They considered us to be a flea on an elephant," Cooper told BBC.

"I said 'Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cellphone, a real, handheld, portable cellphone.' There was a silence at the other end. I suspect he was grinding his teeth."

The phone he called on was a prototype Motorola DynaTAC which, a decade later, was to become the world's first commercially available mobile handset. It got the FCC's thumbs up in 1983 and launched in 1984 at a cost of $3,995 -- which is about $9,000 today, accounting for inflation.

As a symbol for '80s yuppie tech, the DynaTAC appeared in Gordon Gekko's hands in Wall Street, and later, Patrick Bateman used one in American Psycho. It was also known as the "Zack Morris phone" because the Saved by the Bell character often used a similar model in the series.

The first mobile phone call in the UK took place in 1985. Comedian and one-half of Morecambe and Wise, Ernie Wise, called from London to Vodafone's Newbury, Berkshire offices, then located over a curry house.

The world's first smartphone debuted in 1993 at Florida's Wireless World Conference. Launched by BellSouth Cellular and "weighing in at a little more than a pound," it was a phone-come-PDA with an early LCD touchscreen display.

The press release from the launch describes the new handset: "Designed by IBM, Simon looks and acts like a cellular phone but offers much more than voice communications. In fact, users can employ Simon as a wireless machine, a
pager, an electronic mail device, a calendar, an appointment schedular, an address book, a calculator and a pen-based sketchpad -- all at the suggested retail price of $899."

With only 2,000 Simons made, the handset is now a collector's item. The Microsoft-backed Bill Buxton Collection of retro tech boasts a Simon, and you can find out more about the pioneering device on the website.

There are various theories
about who invented the text message. Short, text-based messaging was developed in a range of telecommunications systems toward the end of the 20th century, but the man credited with creating the SMS -- the mobile phone's short message service -- is German Friedhelm Hillebrand.

Working for the GSM group, Hillebrand came up with the concept of a 128-byte text message to be sent via the existing mobile phone network. The message's shortness was an obvious parameter due to the size limit, but the exact 160-character limitation was a curious creation of Hillebrand's.

The story goes that in 1985 Hillebrand experimented with making notes on his typewriter to come up with the ideal message length. "Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page. Each blurb ran on for a line or two and nearly always clocked in under 160 characters," the L.A. Times reports.

He ultimately deemed the 160-character limit as "perfectly sufficient," and with two more "convincing arguments" (postcards and Telex transmissions often had fewer than 150 characters), the GSM group created the standard in 1986. Afterwards, all mobile phone carriers and mobile phones were ordered to support it.

Nowadays you can send messages longer than 160 characters, but Hillebrand's legacy lives on via Twitter. The micro-blogging service's 140-character limit was determined by text messaging -- 140 characters for the tweet and 20 for the Twitter username.

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Chances are you've received a "phantom" call on your mobile phone, especially if your name begins with an "A." "Pocket (or 'butt') dialing," when a jostled phone calls a number from someone's pocket or bag, is one of the minor annoyances of mobile life.

For the emergency services though, it's a more serious problem. In the early 2000s the National Emergency Number Association revealed that "phantom wireless calls" made up about 70% of 911 calls in some U.S. areas. In the UK the figure reached as many as 11,000 calls per day.

So why is a pocket dial so likely to reach 911 or 999? Although a phone's keypad may have been "locked," these numbers will still dial in case of a real emergency. In fact, many older American mobiles auto-dialled 911 when a caller pressed and held number nine, or two numbers at once.

Phone designers and manufacturers have now disabled such options, but pocket dialing still happens. Last year two men were overheard during a car burglary after one of their phones called 911. In May of this year a drug dealer was arrested after he pocket-dialed the policerepeatedly called the police from his pocket. during a deal. And a Maine man with an arrest warrant was "triangulated" and caught when he

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