Martin Cooper (inventor)

Martin Cooper (born December 26, 1928) is an American engineer.

He is a pioneer in the wireless communications industry, especially in radio spectrum management, with eleven patents in the field.

Car phones had been in limited use in large U.S. cities since the 1930s but Cooper championed cellular telephony for more general personal, portable communications.

He believed the cellular phone should be a "personal telephone – something that would represent an individual so you could assign a number; not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home, but to a person."

Although it has been stated that Cooper's vision for the device was inspired by Captain James T. Kirk using his Communicator on the television show Star Trek, Cooper himself later said that his actual inspiration was Dick Tracy's wrist radio.

Bell Labs had introduced the idea of cellular communications in 1947, but their first systems were limited to car phones which required roughly 30 pounds (12 kg) of equipment in the trunk.

Motorola gained Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval for cellular licenses to be assigned to competing entities and prevented an AT&T monopoly on cellular service.

Cooper worked at Motorola for 29 years; building and managing both its paging and cellular businesses.

He also led the creation of trunked mobile radio, quartz crystals, oscillators, liquid crystal displays, piezo-electric components, Motorola A. M. stereo technology and various mobile and portable two-way radio product lines.

Cooper rose to Vice-President and Corporate Director of Research and Development at Motorola.

He graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1950 and served as a submarine officer during the Korean War.

Cooper left his first job at Teletype Corporation in Chicago in 1954 and joined Motorola, Inc. (Schaumburg, Illinois) as a senior development engineer in the mobile equipment group.

In 1957, he earned his master's degree from IIT in electrical engineering and in 2004 received an honorary doctorate degree from IIT.

He serves on the university's board of trustees.

He developed products including the first cellular-like portable handheld police radio system, produced for the Chicago police department in 1967.

By the early 1970s, Cooper headed Motorola's communications systems division.

On April 3, 1973, he placed the first public call from a handheld portable cell phone while working at Motorola, from a Manhattan sidewalk to his counterpart at competitor Bell Labs.

Cooper reprised the first handheld cellular mobile phone (distinct from the car phone) in 1973 and led the team that re-developed it and brought it to market in 1983.

He is considered the "father of the (handheld) cell phone".

Cooper is co-founder of numerous communications companies with his wife and business partner Arlene Harris; He is co-founder and current Chairman of Dyna LLC, in Del Mar, California.

Cooper also sits on committees supporting the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and the United States Department of Commerce.

Here he conceived of the first portable cellular phone in 1973 and led the 10-year process of bringing it to market.

Top management at Motorola supported Cooper's mobile phone concept, investing $100 million between 1973 and 1993 before any revenues were realized.

Cooper assembled a team that designed and assembled a product in less than 90 days.

That original handset, called the DynaTAC 8000x (DYNamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) weighed 2.5 pounds (1.1 kg), measured 10 inches (25 cm) long and was dubbed "the brick" or "the shoe" phone.

A very substantial part of the DynaTAC was the battery, which weighed four to five times more than a modern cell phone.

The phone had only 30 minutes of talk time before requiring a 10-hour recharge but according to Cooper, "The battery lifetime wasn't really a problem because you couldn't hold that phone up for that long!"

Cooper is the lead inventor named on "radio telephone system" filed on October 17, 1973, with the U.S. Patent Office and later issued as U.S. Patent 3,906,166.

John Francis Mitchell, Motorola's Chief of Portable Communication Products (and Cooper's Manager and Mentor) and the engineers who worked for Cooper and Mitchell are also named on the patent.

On April 3, 1973, Cooper and Mitchell demonstrated two working phones to the media and to passers-by prior to walking into a scheduled press conference at the New York City Hilton in midtown Manhattan.

Standing on Sixth avenue near the Hilton, Cooper made the first handheld cellular phone call in public from the prototype DynaTAC.

The call connected him to a base station Motorola had installed on the roof of the Burlington House (now the AllianceBernstein Building) and into the AT&T land-line telephone system.

Reporters and onlookers watched as Cooper dialed the number of his chief competitor Dr. Joel S. Engel at AT&T.

"Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone."

That public demonstration landed the DynaTAC on the July 1973 cover of Popular Science Magazine.

As Cooper recalls from the experience: "I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter – probably one of the most dangerous things I have ever done in my life."

That first cell phone began a fundamental technology and communications market shift to making phone calls to a person instead of to a place.

By 1983 and after four iterations, the handset was reduced to half its original weight.

In 2010, Cooper was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for leadership in the creation and deployment of the cellular portable hand-held telephone.

Cooper was born in Chicago to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants.