Who is Martin Cooper?

• Cooper made history by making the first mobile phone call on 3 April 1973.

Martin Cooper’s origins and education

Martin Cooper was born on 26 December 1928 in Chicago to a family of Ukrainian immigrants in modest circumstances. Although he acknowledges that he ‘never went hungry,’ the truth is that ‘his parents earned very little selling products door-to-door on credit,’ as reported by The Economist.

From an early age, he showed a keen interest in technology, as he explained in an interview: “Ever since I was a child, I liked to take things apart and invent new ones… I still remember when I was a child and tried to really understand how things worked.”

Martin Cooper and Illinois Tech

Later, in order to pay for his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), he joined the Army, which led him to participate in the Korean War.

In 1950, Cooper graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from this institution, where he would go on to obtain a master’s degree in the same discipline seven years later. In 2004, he also received an honorary doctorate from the same university, where he is also a Life Trustee on the board of trustees, an honorary and lifetime position.

About this institution, Cooper explained that Illinois Tech taught him ‘principles that have survived multiple generations of technology,’ adding that it is ‘the foundation of a career as an engineer, inventor, and entrepreneur.’

Work at Motorola

In 1954, Cooper joined Motorola, where he developed a prototype mobile phone when he was appointed Director of Innovation and Development.

He spent a decade developing the DynaTAC 8000X project. However, the project was costly for the company, and some employees wanted to abandon the research and focus on expanding the existing market based on incorporating telephones into cars.

The engineer worked at Motorola for almost 30 years, specifically until 1983.

It was during his years working for the American multinational that one of the great milestones in the history of telecommunications took place.

First mobile phone call

Martin Cooper has gone down in history for making the first call with a mobile phone.

This event, which took place on 3 April 1973 – the reason why Mobile Phone Day is celebrated on that date – occurred during a press conference at a New York hotel where the company was going to present this technological advance.

However, Cooper decided to take it out onto the street with a journalist to demonstrate it, which proved to be a marketing success.

Cooper’s call was symbolically made to Joel Engel, Cooper’s ‘rival’ at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories, a company named after its founder, Alexander Graham Bell.

This device, called DynaTAC, had a battery life of just half an hour and was large in size, weighing almost a kilo, and was marketed in the following decade at a high price of $4,000.

As reported by The Economist, ‘Cooper had been battling with Motorola’s accountants for a decade, who kept asking him when he was going to stop spending so much money on his pet project and start generating revenue,’ to which the engineer replied that his focus had always been on the long-term technological vision.

As explained on the Guinness World Records website about the first call in history, Cooper’s working premise was that ‘people want to talk to other people, not to a house, an office or a car. If they have a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, without the limitations of the famous copper wire. That freedom is what we tried to demonstrate clearly in 1973.’

What is the connection between the mobile phone used to make the first call and Star Trek?

As a curiosity, we could add that Cooper was directly inspired by the wireless communicators used by Captain Kirk in the 1960s Star Trek series.

Princess of Asturias Award in 2009

Among other recognitions, in 2009, Cooper—along with Ray Tomlison, inventor of email—received the Prince of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research.

The jury for these prestigious awards ranked his contributions ‘among the greatest technological innovations of our time, revolutionising the way billions of people around the world communicate and contributing decisively to the advancement of knowledge’. The jury also ranked both the mobile phone and email as ‘key instruments’ for achieving the SDGs.

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