On January 2015, XNUMX we celebrate not only the new year but also a historic event that has revolutionized human habits in a very short time: the first call from a mobile phone. In fact, the first phone call from a mobile device occurred 30 years ago in the UK on the Vodafone network. Michael Harrison, the son of Sir Ernest Harrison, former chairman of Vodafone, was the first to put the system to the test by calling his father for midnight greetings on 1 January 1985.
The historic phone call came from a heavy mobile phone. It's about the Portable Vodafone VT1, which weighed 5 kilos and had a talk time of about 30 minutes. A mobile phone weighing more than today's laptop PCs and with a talk time 10-15 times less than today's low-end smartphones.
When Sir Ernest answered the phone, he heard Michael say, “Hi Dad, it's Mike. This is the first ever phone call ever made on a commercial mobile network." Harrison recalls that the line did not present noise, even if the celebrations on Christmas Eve in London created a lot of background noise. For the first 9 days of 1985 Vodafone it was the only company with a mobile phone network in Great Britain. Before the end of 1985 Vodafone managed to sell over 12 portable mobile phones. Before Michael Harrison's famous phone call, the phone company had already received over 2 orders. The price of the mobile phone was around £2, or around £5000 at current values after inflation. Thirty years later the group is present in the lives of 400 million people around the world.
To commemorate the historic first mobile phone call Vodafone has launched an initiative asking people to share their memories of their first mobile phone and the first call from a mobile phone, using hashtags #myfirstmobile e #30YearsVodafone.
