Martin Cooper at Taipei in 2007 with his 1973 DynaTAC, which weighed about 1.5 kg. Photo: Rico Shen

Who would have thought that the sleek thing sitting lightly in the palms of our hands was once a bulky handset weighing more than three kilos?

Considering that mobile phones turned 40 this month, they have aged rather well.

On April 3, 1973, a Motorola employee – Martin Cooper – made a call in New York on a Motorola DynaTAC, a phone large as a brick. It was the first public mobile phone call on earth and lasted 20 minutes before the battery went flat, requiring 10 long hours to recharge.

Michael Bianchi, non-executive director at Vodafone and the man who brought mobile phones to Malta in 1989, said: “Nobody worldwide thought that it would be so successful at the time.”

A couple of years earlier, Mr Bianchi had been reading an article in The Telegraph about the recent technological fad involving ‘car phones’. “The idea was that these phones could be used while commuting,” he recalled. He corresponded with the companies mentioned in the article – via fax, “remember there was no e-mail at the time” – and one of them replied by return fax.

Nobody had any idea that it would change our lives so radically

At the time, everyone thought the car phones were no more than a craze.

“The forecast was that in England they would peak at about one million and I was told that in Malta it would peak at about 3,000 sales,” he said.

Several governmental meetings and a suc­cessful tender later, the island had mobile telephony, even before most other European countries, apart from the UK and Scandinavia. “Still, nobody had any idea that it would change our lives so radically,” he noted.

The company, which later morphed into Vodafone, was initially called Telecell.

“For a long while, it never crossed our minds to call a mobile phone anything but ‘Telecell’, as in: ‘Let me make a phone call in the middle of Republic Street so that everyone can see I’ve got a Telecell’,” Mr Bianchi recounted.

In the initial years, carrying a mobile around was a status symbol. “They were very expensive to buy, not just in Malta but everywhere in the world and tariffs were very high,” said Mr Bianchi.

At about nine inches long and with a heavy battery, the phones of the early 1990s were quite impractical to lug around. “They even came with a battery pack that you could strap on your shoulder to recharge while on the go,” Mr Bianchi chuckled.

In the early days, mobile phones were made for businessmen.

“I remember my mother carrying this box-like thing. I used to be so embarrassed whenever it started ringing,” said a member of a family that was among the mobile phone pioneers in Malta. “It was heavier than a bag of sugar,” she noted.

Meanwhile, the rest of us had to make do with telecards and coins and telephone boxes. But there was another breed of people who made active use of mobile phones early on: journalists.

“They were so expensive that, apart from businessmen and drug traffickers, I think us journalists were the only ones carrying them around,” quipped John Zammit, political editor at Medialink, who started out his career as a journalist with Radio 101.

In 1991, his radio station was one of the very first to equip itself with mobile phones but other stations soon followed suit.

“At the time, competition between radio stations was rife and we would all rush on the scene of an accident to report, live, via phone-ins,” he said. They would be elbowing each other with the huge phones in hand so that the news reader at the studio would introduces them as: “Our journalist on site, reporting live”.

The quality of the sound was crackling but worse things could happen: “Half way through, mid-sentence, the phone battery would die, bringing our live broadcast to an abrupt end,” Mr Zammit laughed.

Journalists in newsrooms had a roster, taking it in turns to ensure that the company phones were charged constantly.

Mr Zammit recalled covering the 1992 election: “We were reporting live from the polling stations, which was really a big feat because in the previous election– a mere five years earlier – I did not even have a landline connection at home.”

Fast forward 20 years and, today, out of choice, people are opting not to install a landline because they are always reachable on their mobile phones.

According to the Malta Communications Authority, mobile phones now seriously outnumber the population with subscriptions topping 521,748 – a mobile and a quarter for every Maltese citizen, including newborn babies.

But mobile phones are more than voice communication now: you can text, take photos, play music and games, send e-mails, download maps, watch video clips and, in some cases, it even talks back to you.