Martin Cooper - History of Cell Phone Martin Cooper talks about the first cell phone call.

Martin Cooper demonstrates the first portable cellular telephone.

April 3, 2003 marked the 30th anniversary of the first public telephone call placed on a portable cellular phone. Martin Cooper ( now chairman, CEO, and co-founder of ArrayComm Inc) placed that call on April 3, 1973, while general manager of Motorola's Communications Systems Division. It was the incarnation of his vision for personal wireless communications, distinct from cellular car phones. That first call, placed to Cooper's rival at AT&T's Bell Labs from the streets of New York City, caused a fundamental technology and communications market shift toward the person and away from the place.

"People want to talk to other people - not a house, or an office, or a car. Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire. It is that freedom we sought to vividly demonstrate in 1973," said Martin Cooper.

Martin Cooperadded, "As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. Remember that in 1973, there weren't cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones. I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter - probably one of the more dangerous things I have ever done in my life."

Following the April 3, 1973, public demonstration, using a "brick"-like 30-ounce phone, Cooper started the 10-year process of bringing the portable cell phone to market. Motorola introduced the 16-ounce "DynaTAC" phone into commercial service in 1983, with each phone costing the consumer $3,500. It took seven additional years before there were a million subscribers in the United States. Today, there are more cellular subscribers than wireline phone subscribers in the world, with mobile phones weighing as little as 3 ounces.

Martin Cooper Today

Martin Cooper's role in conceiving and developing the first portable cellular phone directly impacted his choice to found and lead ARRAY COMM, a wireless technology and systems company founded in 1992. ArrayComm's core adaptive antenna technology increases the capacity and coverage of any cellular system, while significantly lowering costs and making speech more reliable. This technology addresses what Cooper calls "the unfulfilled promise" of cellular, which should be, but still isn't as reliable or affordable as wired telephony.

ArrayComm has also used its adaptive antenna technology to make the Internet "personal" by creating the i-BURST Personal Broadband System, which delivers high-speed, mobile Internet access that consumers can afford.

"It's very exciting to be part of a movement toward making broadband available to people with the same freedom to be anywhere that they have for voice communications today," said Martin Cooper. "People rely heavily on the Internet for their work, entertainment and communication, but they need to be unleashed. We will look back at 2003 as the beginning of the era when the Internet became truly untethered."

Martin Cooper ( cell phone inventor)

Martin Coope

The entire telecommunications industry will be restructured within the next couple of years, the father of the cellular phone says. And if you still do business the old-fashioned way, you will be left in the wake of wireless turbulence.

As a witness to how the major long-haul carriers now scramble to provide wireless, Martin Cooper, chairman, CEO and co-founder of ArrayComm Inc. says the industry is moving away from technological divisions and more into the area of perceived service.

"The divisions we made in the past, like local, long distance, analog or digital are disappearing, if they haven't disappeared already," says Cooper. "There is hardly analog left anywhere. It is now voice as data, and there are different kinds of data."

Vital Stats

Title: Chairman/CEO Hobbies: Running, skiing, swimming, kayaking. Philosophical belief: There is no lack of spectrum, only a lack of spectral efficiency. Membership: Radio Club of America. Accolades: Has been granted six patents in the communications field; widely published on various aspects of communications technology and management of research and development; RCR/CTIA Wireless Hall of Fame; Red Herring magazine's Top 10 Entrepreneurs of 2000.

Because of this, Cooper says wireless--and especially his newest endeavor at ArrayComm--is an opportunity that will revolutionize telecom today and tomorrow, just as his cell phone began changing calling habits in the 1970s.

Cooper adds that carriers, resellers and independent agents can claim a stake in this future, if they are concerned about personal communications services.

"And they certainly will have to be concerned, because eventually all services will be wireless," says Cooper. "I'm not just speaking about voice. I'm speaking of all data. When the Internet grows up, most Internet services are going to be wireless."

But first, wireless must mature, he says.

"Everybody I know has been on a cell phone call and will say, 'Let's finish this call on a real phone.' There is no fundamental reason wireless can't be as good as wireline," Cooper insists.

So the man who is credited for creating the cell phone in 1973 while working for Motorola Inc. and who lives by the principle that "There is no lack of spectrum, only a lack of spectral efficiency" has a new technology that he believes will once again shake up telecom dramatically.

Many people might be satisfied with one gigantic accomplishment in a lifetime. Cooper was not.

"Think about what the alternative is," says the 71-year-old. "You could sit around talking about the past and boring people to death, or you can keep active and be where the action is. Your mind and body have similar attributes. If you stop using your mind and body, they atrophy. That is why I run six miles every other day. I lift weights for 20 minutes on the days I run.

"To keep up with these smart alecs, you have to keep yourself exercised and persuade yourself to stay younger."

Cooper is credited as a co-founder of ArrayComm--his fifth startup. The "technical" founder is one of those "smart alecs" who sought out Cooper nine years ago at the suggestion of Arnaud Saffari, the company's executive vice president. Saffari heard a concept from a "techie," and told him no one would listen to him unless he could convince someone in the industry who had clout, Cooper recalls.

"I hear ideas like this on an average of one every two weeks," Cooper says. "This guy persisted, and the only time I could find to meet with him was during my running time during a convention in New Orleans."

Cooper laughs at that meeting. He says the youngster was cruising alongside him explaining his idea, while the older man says he probably looked as if he was huffing-and-puffing to get through the run.

But it was a meeting that satisfied "Cooper's law" of squeezing more stuff into the spectrum.

"The problem right now is capacity," Cooper explains. "If we can find a way to increase capacity and make it less costly, we can get to the point where personal communications can be done completely wireless. The key issue is how much stuff can you squeeze into a radio frequency. We've been searching for ways to squeeze more onto frequencies since Marconi invented radio.

"I've come up with a way to squeeze more into a radio frequency by 10 trillion times."

Company Snapshot

Name: ArrayComm Inc. Headquarters: San Jose, Calif. Founded: 1992 Mission: To improve the spectral efficiency of wireless systems Founders: Martin Cooper, Arnaud Saffari, Craig Barratt No. of Employees: 160 Sales and research: $20 million, global

He explains that with Marconi's discovery, the conversation was simply two-way radio. After the invention of the cell phone, the 1980s allowed the technology to provide "confined wireless conversations" within a specific distance.

Cooper says, "Now, we can deliver the entire radio spectrum to each individual. We can do this by literally placing radio energy around the individual."

According to Cooper, the proof is in Southeast Asia, where ArrayComm already has installed 50,000 base stations.

Cooper says the ArrayComm methodology is through what the company calls i-BURST, its "smart antennae arrays" that direct data transmissions at 1mbps.

"We've only seen a trace of what will be possible in the next 10 or 15 years," says Cooper, explaining that i-BURST will allow streaming media from the Internet anywhere on earth. He compares the performance of the i-BURST system with current cellular to a Razor Scooter up against an F-16.

"What we do comes down to the matter of how we are combining the signals, which allows us to receive signals from the people from whom we want, and to reject the signals who interfere with us," Cooper explains.

The array requires 10 or 12 antennas. This allows the system to act more like a radio station engineer who processes the music sent over the air.

"Think about how you hear," Cooper explains. "If you and I are in a room and are speaking, you can close your eyes and you know exactly where I am because you have two ears, and because my voice gets to your ears at different times, your brain can figure out where in the room I am."

In a room with a lot of people, however, a person's brain goes into overdrive in order to zero in on specific conversations or sounds. This is what Cooper calls the "cocktail party effect."

"Your brain has the ability of focusing in, and if someone behind you says something that interests you, your mind immediately focuses on that," he says. "You haven't moved your head, but you think differently. You can reject the first person.

"That is what we do. Instead of two ears, we have 10 or 12. We can really magnify the signal. Furthermore, while you have one mouth when you talk, we have 10 or 12 antennas."

The technology is also able to work on top of any existing system, Cooper says.

"How does this relate to your clients? Well, if they've built a wireless system and apply our kind of technology, they need many fewer base stations to serve more people," Cooper says.

While he is excited at what ArrayComm is doing, Cooper admits that he has "always lived in the future."

His first cell phone was a 29-ounce, brick-like device. Now he marvels at how similarly today's cell phones resemble the communicator Capt. James T. Kirk used on television's original "Star Trek."

And in a few short years, it may become similar to what was used in "Star Trek: The Next Generation." Cooper told a CNN audience during a recent interview, "The future of the cell phone will continue to be personal. ... In the long term, you may even have your cell phone embedded, perhaps, under the skin behind your ear."

During his interview with PHONE+, Cooper said, "It's really embarrassing, but television did not become commercial until I was past my teen years." Instead, he read science fiction novels, and he recognizes that many of today's technologies were born through the imaginative visions of what was, decades ago, science fiction.

So maybe Cooper's major contribution is in bringing science fiction to reality.

Who Invented the Cell Phone?

The cell phone was invented by bell labs from about 1947 to 1967….by Martin cooper who at that time was a vice-president at Motorola….he made the first cell-phone call in 1973 on a street corner in New York using a base station at the top of a tall building in that city. He called an acquaintance at AT&T who at that time was a rival and perhaps said something like “we’ve done it”. Motorola introduced its cell phone in 1983 after five generations, 15 years, and $ 90 million; …the first commercial cell phone service was started by NTT in Japan on December 3, 1979….Cooper himself… states that “Bell Labs had invented this thing called cellular technology”. What Martin Cooper apparently did was build a relatively small radio telephone which could be carried by a person. He did not develop the idea and the mechanism for automatically switching over when a phone went from one cell to another. The true inventor of the cell phone is the person or group who developed the concept of small cells and implemented the automatic switchover system, and this was Bell Labs. ….Necessity is the mother of invention. If… the FCC had not limited the number of channels available for radio telephones to 23, Bell Labs would not have been under intense pressure to develop the cellular concept. …Finally the explosion of cellular technology which we now see around us today was caused by the Microprocessor, i.e. a computer on a small single chip.

Martin Cooper - Inventor Of The Cellphone

Dr Martin Cooper, a former general manager for the systems division at Motorola, is considered the inventor of the first portable handset and the first person to make a call on a portable cell phone in April 1973. The first call he made was to his rival, Joel Engel, Bell Labs head of research.

AT&T's research arm, Bell Laboratories, introduced the idea of cellular communications in 1947. But Motorola and Bell Labs in the sixties and early seventies were in a race to incorporate the technology into portable devices.

Cooper, now 70, wanted people to be able to carry their phones with them anywhere.

While he was a project manager at Motorola in 1973, Cooper set up a base station in New York with the first working prototype of a cellular telephone, the Motorola Dyna-Tac. After some initial testing in Washington for the F.C.C., Mr. Cooper and Motorola took the phone technology to New York to show the public.

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The First Cellphone (1973) Name: Motorola Dyna-Tac Size: 9 x 5 x 1.75 inches Weight: 2.5 pounds Display: None Number of Circuit Boards: 30 Talk time: 35 minutes Recharge Time: 10 hours Features: Talk, listen, dial

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In 1973, when the company installed the base station to handle the first public demonstration of a phone call over the cellular network, Motorola was trying to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to allocate frequency space to private companies for use in the emerging technology of cellular communications. After some initial testing in Washington for the F.C.C., Mr. Cooper and Motorola took the phone technology to New York to show the public.

On April 3, 1973, standing on a street near the Manhattan Hilton, Mr. Cooper decided to attempt a private call before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. He picked up the 2-pound Motorola handset called the Dyna-Tac and pushed the "off hook" button.

The phone came alive, connecting Mr. Cooper with the base station on the roof of the Burlington Consolidated Tower (now the Alliance Capital Building) and into the land-line system. To the bewilderment of some passers-by, he dialed the number and held the phone to his ear.

Who is he?
Cooper grew up in Chicago and earned a degree in electrical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. After four years in the navy serving on destroyers and a submarine, he worked for a year at a telecommunications company.

Hired by Motorola in 1954, Mr. Cooper worked on developing portable products, including the first portable handheld police radios, made for the Chicago police department in 1967. He then led Motorola's cellular research.