In 1973 a Motorola team led by Martin Cooper demonstrated the first handheld cellular telephone in a public call on a New York street. The first commercial cellular networks followed, launching in Japan in 1979 and in the United States and Nordic countries in the early 1980s, with US service beginning in 1983. These analogue 'first generation' systems were succeeded by the digital GSM standard, which entered service in 1991 and enabled text messaging and, later, mobile data. Handsets shrank from heavy car-mounted units to pocket devices over two decades.
It untethered communication from fixed lines, and with the later arrival of mobile internet it freed work, social contact and access to information from the home and office, reshaping how people use urban space.
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