This is him, the figure who created the cellphone who is nicknamed the father of the cellphone – Do you know who the figure behind the inventor of the cellphone made communication easier?
After the telephone was first discovered in 1876 by a Scottish-born scientist, Alexander Graham Bell, the cell phone was finally discovered for the first time by an American war veteran, Martin Marty Cooper.
Summarizing the Smart Class educational platform , Cooper, who was born on December 26 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, United States, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 1950.
Then, he became the leader of a team of engineers from Motorola as director of Research and Development.
Cooper had the task of developing a handheld mobile device that was different from a car phone (Car Phone). Cooper is also the CEO and founder of ArrayComm, a company working in Smart Antenna technology research and developing wireless networks, and is Motorola’s director of Research and Development.
Martin Cooper’s journey in making cellphones
While working, Cooper then took a master’s degree and in 1957 succeeded in receiving a master’s degree in electronics engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology.
In 1960, he played an important role in changing information technology which was previously limited to being used in a single building into a wider one that could connect cities.
One of his work achievements was when he helped fix a defect in a Motorola crystal made for a radio. This prompted the company to mass produce the first quartz crystals for use in quartz watches.
In the 1970s, John F. Mitchell, who was the chief engineer of Motorola’s portable communications project, gave Cooper responsibility for the car telephone division (Carphone).
Mitchell and Cooper envisioned a communications product that would be small and light enough to be portable. The two of them took 90 days in 1972 to create the first prototype of the idea.
First call with cell phone
Cooper, Mitchell and other engineers finally patented the invention of the “Radio Telephone System” which was filed on October 17, 1973 with patent number 3906166 and approved in September 1975 in their names.
Cooper is considered to be the inventor of the first cellular telephone (cellphone) and the first person to make a call with the prototype of the cellular cellphone on April 3, 1973.
This historic event was witnessed publicly in front of journalists and passersby on the streets of New York City.
The first call was addressed to Dr. Joel S. Engel, head of research at Bell Labs. This first call marked the start of a fundamental shift in technology and the communications market towards portable telephone communications where someone could directly communicate directly with other people, no longer relying on landlines.
Martin Cooper later revealed that he got the idea to develop a cell phone after watching Captain Kirk use a communicator on the television series Star Trek. Until finally, Cooper was called the “Father of Cellular Telephones (Cell Phones)”
In this discovery, Cooper succeeded in creating the first Motorola DynaTAC handset with a weight of 1 kg (2.2 pounds) and 35 minutes of talk time.
By 1983, after four iterations, Cooper’s team had halved the weight of the handset. The price of the product is around USD 4,000 (or the same value as USD 8,600 in 2009).
Cooper left Motorola before they started selling mobile phones to consumers. Until finally, Cooper started a company with partners that provided a billing system for cellular operators.
Subsequently, in 1992, Martin Cooper joined forces with Richard Roy, a researcher at Stanford University, to form ArrayComm. The company began to specialize in creating more efficient cellular communications. While leading this company, Cooper created Cooper’s Law.
This law states that every 30 months the amount of information transmitted over a certain amount of the radio spectrum doubles. He stated that this law had been in effect since 1897 when Marconi patented the first wireless telegraph.
Until finally, in 1995, Cooper received the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for technological innovation in the communications sector.
In 2000, Martin Cooper was included in Red Herring magazine’s Top Ten Entrepreneurs. In 2009, he along with Raymond Tomlinson was awarded the Prince of Asturias, an award for scientific and technical research.
