Cooper, Martin

Martin Cooper, byname Marty Cooper, (born December 26, 1928, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.), American engineer who led the team that in 1972–73 built the first mobile cell phone and made the first cell phone call. He is widely regarded as the father of the cellular phone.

Cooper graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering (1950). He joined the U.S. Navy and served during the Korean War. After the war, he joined the Teletype Corporation, and in 1954 he began working at Motorola. He earned a master’s in electrical engineering from IIT (1957). At Motorola, Cooper worked on many projects involving wireless communications, such as the first radio-controlled traffic-light system, which he patented in 1960, and the first handheld police radios, which were introduced in 1967. He later served as a vice president and director of research and development (1978–83) for the company.

Mobile telephones had been introduced by the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1946. However, in a given area only 11 or 12 channels were available, so users often had to wait to use the system. Another weakness of the first mobile phones was that the large amount of power needed to run them could be supplied only by car batteries. Thus, there were no truly portable phones but only car phones.

In 1947 AT&T Bell Laboratories engineers W. Rae Young and Douglas H. Ring showed that more mobile users could be added by breaking down a large area into many smaller cells, but that required more frequency coverage than was then available. However, in 1968 the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) asked AT&T for a plan for employing a little-used portion of the UHF (ultrahigh frequency) television band. AT&T proposed a cellular architecture to expand its car-phone service.

Motorola did not want AT&T to have a monopoly on cell phones and feared the end of its mobile business. Cooper was placed in charge of the urgent project to develop a cell phone. He thought that the cell phone should not be chained to the car but should be portable. The result, the DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) phone, was 23 cm (9 inches) tall and weighed 1.1 kg (2.5 pounds). It allowed 35 minutes of talk before its battery ran down.

On April 3, 1973, Cooper introduced the DynaTAC phone at a press conference in New York City. To make sure that it worked before the press conference, he placed the first public cell phone call, to engineer Joel Engel, head of AT&T’s rival project, and gloated that he was calling from a portable cellular phone.

In 1983, after years of further development, Motorola introduced the first portable cell phone for consumers, the DynaTAC 8000x. Despite its price of $3,995, the phone was a success. That same year, Cooper left Motorola and founded Cellular Business Systems, Inc. (CBSI), which became the leading company in billing cellular phone services. In 1986 he and his partners sold CBSI to Cincinnati Bell for $23 million, and he and his wife, Arlene Harris, founded Dyna, LLC. Dyna served as a central organization from which they launched other companies, such as ArrayComm (1996), which developed software for wireless systems, and GreatCall (2006), which provided wireless service for the Jitterbug, a cell phone with simple features meant for the elderly. Cooper received the Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering in 2013.