Joel, this is Marty, I’m calling you from a cell phone – a real hand-held portable cell phone.
"Martin Cooper"
40th Anniversary of the Mobile Phone
The 1960s TV hit Get Smart featured a running gag about a shoe phone — a phone embedded in Maxwell Smart’s shoe. One reason it was funny was that it seemed so far-fetched.
But not to the Motorola engineers who, in April 1973, released the world’s first cellphone. They used to call it the Shoe Phone because that was the only thing they had to compare it to.