On the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day in 1985, 24-year-old trainee accountant Michael Harrison made history.
Standing in London’s Parliament Square while surrounded by raucous revellers, he phoned his father using what he described as a ‘car battery with a clunky headset stuck to it.’
When his dad broke off from the family party to answer the phone at his home, Mr Harrison told him: ‘Happy New Year Dad, it’s Mike here. This is the very first call ever made on a UK mobile network.’
So there it was; Britain’s first mobile phone call, made on what was called the Transportable Vodafone VT1, which weighed 11lbs (5kg) and cost £2,000 (£6,000 in today’s money when accounting for inflation).
Mr Harrison’s father, Sir Ernest Harrison, was a founder of Vodafone and the company’s first chairman.
Speaking to MailOnline, Mr Harrison said: ‘Technologically speaking it was a very different world. No one had heard of the term mobile phone.
‘When I appeared in Parliament Square to make the first call to my father, I was carrying what was then the state of the art mobile telephone, which was basically a car battery with a clunky handset stuck to it.
‘There was a crowd looking at this thing I was holding in my hand. It worked.’
On the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Day in 1985, 24-year-old trainee accountant Michael Harrison made history when he made Britain’s first mobile phone call
Mr Harrison, now 64, re-creating the phone call 40 years on
Despite the fact that it was new technology, Mr Harrison said the quality of the call was equivalent to using a landline. ‘You couldn’t tell the difference’, he said.
At the time, Sir Ernest, who died aged 82 in 2009, was running British electronics firm Racal, which Vodafone was spun out of.
Mr Harrison was loaned the phone in the hope that he would surprise his dad. His mother was in on the secret too.
The VT1 was so heavy that Mr Harrison only held the receiver. The rest of the device was put on a table by a team of technicians.
‘He was a visionary in that he was a strong believer that mobile telephony would take off,’ Mr Ernest said of his father.
‘He always felt that human beings liked to talk. If you give them the opportunity to talk to more people in more places then they will, if the technology allows it to be cheap enough and effective enough.
‘So it was a big gamble on technology moving quickly as well.
‘You were never going to get a big network going if you were relying on phones that weighed five kilograms and cost the equivalent of £6,000.’
The Transportable Vodafone VT1 weighed 11lbs (5kg) and cost £2,000 (£6,000 in today’s money when accounting for inflation)
Sir Ernest, who died aged 82 in 2009, was running British electronics firm Racal, which Vodafone was spun out of. Above: Sir Ernest on the phone to his son, and right
But technology did move quickly. Mr Harrison got a car phone in 1986 and then his first hand-held device around three years later.
Just days after his New Year’s Day call, comedian Ernie Wise made what was the first public mobile phone call.
The same device used by Mr Harrison was poignantly carried to St Katerine’s Dock in London on a 19th century mail coach.
Mr Wise’s call was received at Vodafone’s headquarters, which was then above an Indian restaurant in Newbury, Berkshire.
For the first nine days of 1985, Vodafone was the only firm with a mobile network in the UK.
More than 2,000 orders for the first generation of phones were taken even before Mr Harrison made his call. By the end of 1985, 12,000 devices had been sold.
The pivotal moment for the UK’s mobile phone industry came when Racal outbid GEC to buy mobile phone technology.
The men behind the UK launch were Vodafone’s first five employees.
Just days after his New Year’s Day call, comedian Ernie Wise made what was the first public mobile phone call
The network initially only had five base stations, meaning it was only available inside parts of the M25.
But by the end of 1985, it had more than 100 base stations and up to 12,00 customers using mobiles.
Now, mobile phone ownership is virtually universal. According to USwitch, nearly all people in the UK – 98 per cent of those aged 16 to 24 – have a smartphone.
And by the end of 2023, almost 70 per cent of the world’s population were smartphone users, according separate figures from Statista.
But there are downsides too. Fears have been raised over the impact of smartphones on young people, especially their use of social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram.
Last month it emerged that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook’s parent firm Meta – faces an Ofcom investigation after being accused of turning a blind eye to predators advertising AI-generated child sex abuse material.
And MPs are now backing proposed legislation that would limit children’s smartphone use.
Mr Harrison added: ‘Back in 1985 nobody would have predicted just how central to everyone’s life the mobile phone has become.
‘In those days you would have to wait another ten years until the internet arrived. It is incredible how technology and the mobile phone has empowered people in terms of access to information and communication.
‘But at the same time it is a very different outcome from the way the early pioneers like my father thought about the mobile phone.
‘He believed in people talking to each other. But it has gone in a slightly different direction.’
