In April 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper stood on a Manhattan sidewalk and placed the first handheld cell phone call, dialing the rival at AT&T who was trying to build a car-bound alternative. The two-pound DynaTAC prototype he held broke a seventy-year telecom monopoly and seeded a consumer device that now anchors a trillion-dollar app economy, a contested global semiconductor supply chain, and a geopolitical fight between Washington and Beijing.