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The idea of actually phoning someone might bring a lot of people out in a cold sweat.

Modern smartphones mean we can send a text, a photo or even a voice note instead of dialling someone’s number, but that wasn’t always the case in the 20th Century era of the landline.

Phone calls have been made now for almost 150 years. �鶹�� Bitesize takes a look at some of the calls that changed the world.

The first telephone call

“Mr Watson, come here, I want to see you.”

Not the opening to a Sherlock Holmes adventure, but the first words ever spoken on the telephone.

The call took place on 10 March 1876 as the inventor of the telephone Alexander Graham Bell spoke to his assistant.

Bell is credited with being the inventor of the telephone – although this has been disputed over the years.

Other inventors, such as Antonio Meucci and Elisha Gray were also working on audio and telephony devices in the 19th Century, but Bell was the first to successfully patent the idea.

The call that left the planet

The world was watching in 1969 as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon.

The successful mission to the moon also marked one of the most astonishing telephone calls of all time.

While walking on the surface of the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin were called by then US President Richard Nixon, who acknowledged the significance of their conversation.

“Hello Neil and Buzz, I am talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House, and this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House.”

President Nixon made the call via a standard telephone from Washington DC to Houston – the mission’s control centre – before it was beamed to space.

On the streets of New York

Almost the entire first century of phone calls were made on landline phones – units that were plugged directly into phone lines.

But in 1973 in New York City, the technology completely changed.

Motorola engineer Marty Cooper headed onto Sixth Avenue in Manhattan on 3 April with a large, cream coloured telephone handset that was practically the size of his head.

He dialled a telephone number into the device’s keys and rang a counterpart at competing firm Bell Technologies.

In front of astonished onlookers and assembled reporters, Cooper triumphantly told his rival that he was calling from “a personal, handheld, portable cell phone.”

It would be another decade until commercially available mobile phones were sold – and they would only be able to handle 30 minutes of talk time, take 10 hours to charge and weighed almost 800g.

The wait for a British mobile phone took even longer – with the first call being made by Michael Harrison, son of then-Vodafone chairman Sir Ernest Harrison. Moments after Big Ben had rung in the new year on 1 January 1985, Michael called his father to say: “Hi Dad, it's Mike. Happy New Year. This is the first ever call on a UK mobile network."

On top of the world

If you’re struggling to get a decent mobile phone signal, you can often be advised to get to higher ground – but one British climber took this to the ultimate extreme.

On 21 May 2007, Rod Baber became the first person to make a phone call from the summit of Mount Everest – and in turn, claimed the record of the highest mobile phone call made.

Baber was able to connect to a mobile network thanks to a recently installed mobile phone antenna that was in the line of sight of the North ridge of the mountain.

He called a voicemail set up by his sponsors, leaving a message to say: “It’s amazing. The Himalayas are everywhere.” The call lasted almost two minutes and cost £2.39.

Despite temperatures of -30°C, Baber then made a second call to his wife, telling her that “it’s cold, it’s fantastic… I can’t feel my toes.”

This article was published in December 2023