MEET MARTIN COOPER
When I was a kid, telephones were wired to the wall; you could walk and talk as far as that wire would allow. And outside of the house, if you needed to make a call, you had to use a pay phone. That meant you needed to have coins to drop into the slot, and often, you had to have patience as well—because the person using that pay phone was gabbing and chatting and blathering and jabbering… on and on and on.
Personal cell phones? They were only mentioned in sci-fi conversations.
Martin Cooper changed all that.
An electrical engineer who served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, Mr. Cooper joined the Motorola Corporation in 1954. There he worked to introduce the first radio-controlled traffic-light system, as well as the first handheld police radios. He also built the first electronic device for enabling a telephone to ring in the car.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Cooper led Motorola’s team in the development of the DynaTAC phone, a portable cell phone that weighed two-and-a-half pounds and was nine inches tall (the name stood for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage). The phone was heavy (and gigantic) by today’s standards, and its battery only allowed thirty-five minutes of talk time on a charge.
On the day that the DynaTAC was introduced at a New York City press conference, Mr. Cooper made the first public cell phone call ever—to brag about the new phone to Joel Engel, head of a similar project at AT&T, Motorola’s chief rival. His immortal words: “I’m calling you from a cell phone… a handheld, personal portable cell phone.”
The phone stayed in development for another ten years; in 1983, Motorola introduced the more advanced DynaTAC8000X, the first consumer portable cell phone (its price was about $4,000!).
Since then, Mr. Cooper’s breakthrough technology has been adapted and improved by many companies. Today’s mobile phones are also cameras, video recorders and game machines, with fitness and health technology, calendars, and so much more built in. And, best of all, they’re much smaller and weigh considerably less than the DynaTAC.
As for Mr. Cooper, he went on to play an important role in the introduction of Wi-Fi, liquid-crystal displays, and two-way pagers. He is widely considered a visionary leader in wireless technology. Mr. Cooper was quoted as saying, “I’m not that great an engineer, but I’m a very good dreamer… the skill is ignoring reality and thinking about what could really be.”
Mr. Cooper, thank you for dreaming big. With more than half of the people in the world owning cell phones and using Wi-Fi daily, your dreams have changed lives everywhere.