Martin Cooper (inventor)

{{Infobox person

| name = Martin Cooper

| image = Martin Cooper, Two Antennas, October 2010.jpg

| image_size = 200px

| caption = Cooper in 2007

| birth_name =

| birth_date = {{Birth date and age|1928|12|26}}

| birth_place = Chicago, Illinois, U.S.

| death_date =

| death_place =

| other_names = Marty Cooper

| known_for = Inventor of the first handheld cellular mobile phone

| education = Illinois Institute of Technology (BS, MS)

| awards = Marconi Prize (2013),

ITU 150 Awards (2015)[https://itu150.org/awards/] ITU 150 Awards

| title = Motorola
Founder & CEO of ArrayComm
Co-founder and chairman of Dyna LLC

| occupation = {{hlist|Inventor|entrepreneur|executive}}

| spouse = {{marriage|Arlene Harris|1991}}

| website = {{URL|www.dynallc.com}}

}}

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.[http://encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-2506300048.html Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2008]. encyclopedia.com[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/07/technology/as-wireless-spectrum-is-squeezed-sharing-is-seen-as-solution.html?_r=0, Companies Try to Create Room on Radio Spectrum], The New York Times, July 6, 2012

On April 3, 1973, Cooper 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.[http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/01/greene.first.cellphone.call/index.html 38 years ago he made the first cell phone call], CNN. April 3, 2011[https://www.npr.org/2023/04/03/1167815751/50-years-ago-martin-cooper-made-the-first-cell-phone-call 50 years ago, Martin Cooper made the first cellphone call] Cooper reprised the first handheld cellular mobile phone (distinct from the car phone) in 1973 and led the team that redeveloped it and brought it to market in 1983.[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/2963619.stm A Chat With the Man Behind the Mobiles], BBC, April 21, 2003[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/click_online/8639590.stm Meet Marty Cooper, the Inventor of the Mobile Phone], BBC, April 23, 2010 He is considered the "father of the (handheld) cell phone".[http://www.economist.com/node/13725793?story_id=13725793, Father of the Cell Phone], Economist, June 4, 2009[https://archive.today/20130628205859/http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-18560_162-6506912.html The Cell Phone: Marty Coop's Big Idea], CBS News 60 Minutes, June 11, 2010

Cooper is co-founder of numerous communications companies with his wife and business partner Arlene Harris;[http://www.rcrwireless.com/article/20070526/sub/wireless-hall-of-fame-arlene-harris/ Wireless Hall of Fame – Arlene Harris], RCR Wireless, May 26, 2007 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[https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/technology/mobile-carriers-warn-of-spectrum-crisis-others-see-hyperbole.html?pagewanted=all&_r=2& Carriers Warn of Crisis in Mobile Spectrum], The New York Times, April 17, 2012 and the United States Department of Commerce.

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.

Education

Cooper was born in Chicago to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants.{{Cite web|url=https://www.jewoftheweek.net/2011/12/14/jews-of-the-week-martin-cooper-joel-engel/|title=Jews of the Week: Martin Cooper and Joel Engel | Jew of the Week|date=December 14, 2011 }}{{Cite web|url=https://jewishcurrents.org/jewdayo-grid/april-3-the-first-cell-phone-call|title=April 3: The First Cell Phone Call|website=Jewish Currents|access-date=March 8, 2019|archive-date=December 10, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20181210113155/https://jewishcurrents.org/jewdayo-grid/april-3-the-first-cell-phone-call/|url-status=dead}}{{Cite web|url=http://www.amuseum.org/jahf/nomination/nomination2.html|title=Jewish-American Hall of Fame – Nominate Somebody|website=amuseum.org}} He graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1950 and served as a submarine officer during the Korean War.

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.

Career

= Motorola =

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. He developed products including the first cellular-like portable handheld police radio system, produced for the Chicago police department in 1967.Oehmke, Ted (January 6, 2000) [https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/06/technology/cell-phones-ruin-the-opera-meet-the-culprit.html:pagewanted=all&srs=pm Cell Phone Ruin the Opera? Meet the Culprit], The New York TimesReed, Brad (May 9, 2011) [http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2011/25thanniversary/050911-anniversary-cooper.html Meet the guy who made the first cellphone call 40 years ago today], Network World.

By the early 1970s, Cooper headed Motorola's communications systems division. Here he conceived of the first portable cellular phone in 1973 and led the 10-year process of bringing it to market. 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.[https://web.archive.org/web/20071104110249/http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1677329_1677708_1677825,00.html Best Inventions of 2007], Time. 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."

Top management at Motorola supported Cooper's mobile phone concept, investing $100 million between 1973 and 1993 before any revenues were realized.[https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383578,00.asp Inventor of the Cell Phone Says No to AT&T-Mobile, Yes to Apps, and More], PC Magazine, April 15, 2011 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.[http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/07/09/cooper.cell.phone.inventor/index.html?hpt=Sbin Inventor of Cell Phone: We Knew Someday Everybody Would Have One], CNN, July 9, 2010 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!" By 1983 and after four iterations, the handset was reduced to half its original weight.

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.Cooper, Martin et al. "All Signaling" {{US Patent|3906166}}, Issued September 1, 1975 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.[https://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/dayintech_0403 April 3, 1973: Motorola Calls AT&T...by Cell], Wired, April 3, 2008 "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone."[http://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12784072 Twitter, Telegram and Email: Famous First Lines], BBC News, March 21, 2011 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."

File:2007Computex e21Forum-MartinCooper.jpg

That first cell phone began a fundamental technology and communications market shift to making phone calls to a person instead of to a place. 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 crystal 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. In addition to his work on the mobile cellular phone, he was instrumental in expanding the technology of pagers from use within a single building to use across multiple cities. Cooper also worked with inventor Clifford L. Rose to fix a flaw in quartz crystals used in Motorola's radios which encouraged the company to mass-produce the first crystals used in wrist watches.

= Cellular Business Systems =

= Dyna LLC =

File:Martin Cooper and Arlene Harris.jpg]]

Cooper and his wife Arlene Harris founded Dyna LLC in 1986 as a home base for their developmental and support activities for the new companies, Subscriber Computing Inc., Cellular Pay Phone, Inc. (CPPI), SOS Wireless Communications and Accessible Wireless; the later two of which together created the underpinning for the creation of GreatCall, were all launched from Dyna LLC.

From his Dyna headquarters Cooper continues to write and lecture about wireless communications, technological innovation, the Internet and R&D management. He serves on industry, civic and national governmental groups including the U.S. Department of Commerce Spectrum Advisory Committee that advises the Secretary of Commerce of the United States on spectrum policy and the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) Technological Advisory Council.

= GreatCall, Inc =

In 1986 Cooper co-founded Cellular Payphone Inc. (CPPI), the parent company of GreatCall, Inc., Innovator of the Jitterbug cell phone (in partnership with Samsung).[http://www.itp.net/579308-coopers-calling Cooper's Calling], ITP Net, April 21, 2010 GreatCall is the first complete end-to-end value-added service provider in the cellular industry to focus on simplicity with its primary emphasis on senior citizens.

= Arraycomm =

In 1992 Cooper co-founded Arraycomm a developer of software for mobile antenna technologies. Under his leadership, the Company grew from a seed-funded startup in San Jose, California, into the world leader in smart antenna technology with 400 patents issued or pending, worldwide.[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=antennas-get-smart Antennas Get Smart], Scientific American, June 9, 2003

= Energous.com =

Cooper joined the board of directors from 2015 to 2019.

Cooper's law

Cooper found that the ability to transmit different radio communications simultaneously and in the same place has grown at the same pace since Guglielmo Marconi's first transmissions in 1895. This led Cooper to formulate the Law of Spectral Efficiency, otherwise known as Cooper's Law. The law states that the maximum number of voice conversations or equivalent data transactions that can be conducted in all of the useful radio spectrum over a given area doubles every 30 months.

Publications

=Latest publications=

"The Myth of Spectrum Scarcity" Position Paper, March 2010.

"Mobile WiMax – Fourth-Generation Wireless," Bechtel Communications Technical Journal, September 2007.

"The Need for Simplicity," in the anthology "Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change," published by Stanford University in 2007.

"Personal Communications in 2025" for Eta Kappa Nu Electrical and Computer Engineering Honor Society, Autumn 2005.

"Antennas Get Smart" in Scientific American, July 2003.

"Everyone is Wrong" in Technology Review, June 2001.{{Cite web|url=https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401054/everyone-is-wrong/|title=Everyone Is Wrong|first=Technology|last=Review|website=MIT Technology Review}}

Awards and affiliations

Mensa{{cite journal

| title = They're Accomplished, They're Famous, and They're MENSANS

| journal = Mensa Bulletin

| publisher = American Mensa

| issn = 0025-9543 |date=July 2004

| issue = 476

| page = 25}}

1984 – IEEE Centennial Medal and Fellow
1995 – Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award
1996 – Radio Club of America Fred Link Award and Life Fellow with the International Engineering Consortium
2000 – "Red Herring" Magazine Top Ten Entrepreneurs of 2000
2000 – RCR Wireless News Wireless Hall of Fame Inaugural Member
2002 – American Computer Museum George Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Award{{cite web | title=2002 Honoree - for cellphone | website=American Computer and Robotics Museum | url=https://acrmuseum.org/2002 | access-date=6 January 2025}}
2002 – Wireless Systems Design Industry Leader Award
2006 – CITA Emerging Technologies Award
2007 – Wireless World Research Forum Fellow
2007 – Global Spec Great Moments Engineering Award
2008 – CE Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame Award
October 2008 – Top U.S. Wireless Innovators of All Time.
2009 – Prince of Asturias Award for scientific and technical research.{{cite press release

|title = The fathers of the mobile phone and email, Prince of Asturias Award Laureates for Technical and Scientific Research

|publisher = Fundación Príncipe de Asturias

|date = June 17, 2009

|url = http://fundacionprincipedeasturias.org/en/press/news/the-fathers-of-the-mobile-phone-and-email-prince-of-asturias-award-laureates-for-technical-and-scientific-research/

|access-date = June 17, 2009

|url-status = dead

|archive-url = https://archive.today/20120716133104/http://fundacionprincipedeasturias.org/en/press/news/the-fathers-of-the-mobile-phone-and-email-prince-of-asturias-award-laureates-for-technical-and-scientific-research/

|archive-date = July 16, 2012

|df = mdy-all

}}

2009 – Life Trustee, Illinois Institute of Technology
2010 – Radio Club of America, Lifetime Achievement Award{{cite web | title=Lifetime Achievement Award Recipients | website=Radio Club of America | url=https://radioclubofamerica.org/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=500767&module_id=523469 | access-date=6 January 2025}}
October 2010 – Member, National Academy of Engineering
2011 – Inaugural Mikhail Gorbachev: The Man Who Changed the World Awards Nominee
2011 – Webby Award for Lifetime Achievement{{cite web | title=Webby Lifetime Achievement - Martin Cooper | website=Webby Awards | url=https://winners.webbyawards.com/2011/specialachievement/207/martin-cooper#:~:text=The%20Webby%20Awards%20is%20thrilled,portable%20cellular%20phone%20in%201973. | access-date=6 January 2025}}
2012 – Washington Society of Engineers, Washington Award{{cite web | title=Washington Award Recipients | website=The Washington Award | url=https://www.washingtonaward.com/recipients/ | access-date=6 January 2025}}
2013 – Charles Stark Draper Prize, National Academy of Engineering{{cite web | title=Martin Cooper | website=NAE Website | date=30 June 2023 | url=https://www.nae.edu/67257/Martin-Cooper | access-date=6 January 2025}}
2013 – Marconi Prize{{Cite web|url=http://marconisociety.org/fellows/martin-cooper/|title=Martin Cooper – Marconi Society|date=October 26, 2013 }}{{Cite web|url=https://mobileztech4u.blogspot.com/2020/06/who-invented-mobile-phone-and-when.html|title=Martin Cooper - Marconi Award 2013}}{{Dead link|date=September 2023 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}
2013 – Honorary doctorate awarded by the students and the rector of Hasselt University on the occasion of the university's 40th anniversary.[http://www.uhasselt.be/UH/Agenda/Agenda-2013/Academische-Openingszitting-2013-2014.html Academische Openingszitting 2013–2014] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180524222731/https://www.uhasselt.be/UH/Agenda/Agenda-2013/Academische-Openingszitting-2013-2014.html |date=May 24, 2018 }}. uhasselt.be. September 27, 2013
2014 IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu Eminent Member [http://www.hkn.org/awards]
2019 – Leaves the Energous board of directors.
2025 - Recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.{{cite web | author=The White House | title=President Biden Honors Nation’s Leading Scientists, Technologists, and Innovators | website=The White House | date=3 January 2025 | url=https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2025/01/03/president-biden-honors-nations-leading-scientists-technologists-and-innovators/ | access-date=4 January 2025}}

References

External links

{{Triangulation|143|Marty Cooper}}
{{Twitter|name=MartyMobile}}

{{Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research}}

Category:American telecommunications industry businesspeople

Category:20th-century American inventors

Category:1928 births

Category:Living people

Category:Engineers from Chicago

Category:Illinois Institute of Technology alumni

Category:United States Navy personnel of the Korean War

Category:American people of Ukrainian-Jewish descent

Category:Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering

Category:Mensans

Category:IEEE Centennial Medal laureates 81127589 call history