Mobile phone

Until old age he seeks the place on 'where the action is'

Martin Cooper (Chicago, December 26, 1928)

When Martin Cooper, the inventor of the portable telephone, the forerunner of the mobile phone, was three years old, he watched older boys set fire to paper with a magnifying glass and sunbeams. He was completely blown away by that.

Secretly he smashed a bottle and tried to make his own magnifying glass with the bottom of it. He took apart clocks as a child and sometimes he even got them repaired. Martin Cooper grew up in a rough neighborhood of Chicago, where he attended technical school.

His friends in the metalworking department had as their highest ideal the forging of a beautiful brass knuckles. Cooper went on to study electricity at the technical college and when he finished this, the Korean War just broke out.

The years 1950 to 1953 he spent as an engineer on warships.

In his own words, he learned to solve problems and to lead in the navy.

The soldier's life also made it clear to him that technology must have social benefits. "Every application should improve people's lives," Cooper said. 'If you come up with stuff that doesn't contribute to a solution, that doesn't make life better, then you just create waste.'

In 1954 he joined the Motorola company, which owes its name to the fact that it was the first to develop radios for cars in 1930 (from 'motor' and 'victrola', a radio brand).

The idea of developing a mobile phone was old, but in the beginning you still needed a telephone operator, in any case you had to use the traditional telephone network.

It was the Bell Laboratories that came up with the idea just after the Second World War that you could work cellularly, dividing a region into smaller areas ('cells', hence the American cell phone) each with a mast, so that you use less transmission power. needed.

The Motorola research division, headed by Martin Cooper, vied life and death with Bell's laboratories. Cooper later revealed that watching Star Trek in which Captain Kirk communicates wirelessly gave him the idea to focus his research on the cell phone.

In 1973 the time had come.

Cooper set up a base station on one of New York's skyscrapers, and when he had to attend a press conference at the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan on April 3, he picked up his phone—the first cell phone, in fact—and called his biggest rival, Bell's chief engineer. , called Joel Engel.

"Joel, I'm calling you from the street on a real cell phone," Cooper said. He expected to hear a loud curse at the other end, but Engel remained very polite. The new device was big, bigger than a brick, had no screen and only a few keys.

The New Yorkers stopped in the street to stare at Cooper, who made one phone call after another. At one point he even crossed the street while informing a radio journalist about his invention.

It took Motorola ten years to bring the device to the market, so much administrative hassle was involved. The Motorola leadership's total fixation on cars also played a role. Cooper wanted a phone for everyone, everywhere.

The cell phone of 1983 weighed two and a half kilograms and cost four thousand dollars. It took another seven years to reach one million mobile subscriptions in the States. The GSM system, which stands for 'global system for mobile communication', only reached Belgium and the Netherlands in 1994.

Cooper thinks all the bells and whistles that are now in a mobile phone are total nonsense. And for Cooper, the mobile is still too expensive.

The cordless phone is not yet completed. 'Perhaps in a few years' time we will put the mobile phone under the skin, somewhere behind the ear,' he says, 'with connections that are perfect and above all cost nothing.'

Cooper relinquished all his patent rights when he joined Motorola for the price of one dollar.

After his retirement he immediately founded a company for the further development of wireless communication technology. 'You can bore people with talk about the past,' he says matter-of-factly, 'or make sure you are where the action is.' Its ArrayComm is the world leader in multi-antenna signal processing with 300,000 base stations worldwide.

Cooper, 81, is still chairman of the board.

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