Martin Cooper - The inventor of CellPhones
Martin Cooper may not be a household name, but his invention is familiar to more than half the planet's population who now own atleast one mobile phone.
The concept of a handheld phone was his brainchild, and with the help of his Motorola team, the first handset was born in 1973 weighing in at two kilos.
When he stood on a New York street and made the first phone call from a prototype cellular phone, he could not have conceived how successful it would become.
Now a worldwide telecoms industry has sprung up along with a vast array of technologies developed for mobile phones. Cooper told reporters that producing the first phone cost Motorola the equivalent of $1m (£650,000) in today's money.
"We had to virtually shut down all engineering at our company and have everybody working on the phone and the infrastructure to make the thing work," he said.
"Even by 1983, a portable handheld cellular telephone cost $4,000 (£2,600), which would be the equivalent of more than $10,000 (£6,500) today." Mr Cooper said his team faced the challenge of squeezing thousands of parts into a phone for the first time.
"The battery lifetime was 20 minutes, but that wasn't really a big problem because you couldn't hold that phone up for that long." according to Cooper.
In the early 80s mobile phones were a luxury that cost thousands of dollars!
He and his team hoped one day everyone would have their own handset. "In fact we had a joke that said 'in the future, when you were born you would be assigned a telephone number and if you didn't answer the phone, you were dead'.
"We had no idea that in as little as 35 years more than half the people on Earth would have cellular telephones, and they give the phones away to people for nothing." Handheld phones were originally produced to help doctors and hospital staff improve their communications.
He hoped the devices would help bring safety and freedom to people, but the eventual social implications were beyond his understanding almost four decades ago. "We had no idea that things like Facebook and Twitter, and all these other concepts, would ever happen."
As mobile phones go to a fourth generation, with new features in each update, the inventor of the handheld phone said the handset of the future should aim to improve a user's quality of life.
"Technology makes your life better, more convenient, safer, educates you, entertains you, and mostly makes you more productive," said Mr Cooper.
"The cellphone in the long range is going to be embedded under your skin behind your ear along with a very powerful computer who is in effect your slave" predicts Martin Cooper!
When he stood on a New York street and made the first phone call from a prototype cellular phone, he could not have conceived how successful it would become.
Now a worldwide telecoms industry has sprung up along with a vast array of technologies developed for mobile phones. Cooper told reporters that producing the first phone cost Motorola the equivalent of $1m (£650,000) in today's money.
"We had to virtually shut down all engineering at our company and have everybody working on the phone and the infrastructure to make the thing work," he said.
"Even by 1983, a portable handheld cellular telephone cost $4,000 (£2,600), which would be the equivalent of more than $10,000 (£6,500) today." Mr Cooper said his team faced the challenge of squeezing thousands of parts into a phone for the first time.
"The battery lifetime was 20 minutes, but that wasn't really a big problem because you couldn't hold that phone up for that long." according to Cooper.
He and his team hoped one day everyone would have their own handset. "In fact we had a joke that said 'in the future, when you were born you would be assigned a telephone number and if you didn't answer the phone, you were dead'.
"We had no idea that in as little as 35 years more than half the people on Earth would have cellular telephones, and they give the phones away to people for nothing." Handheld phones were originally produced to help doctors and hospital staff improve their communications.
He hoped the devices would help bring safety and freedom to people, but the eventual social implications were beyond his understanding almost four decades ago. "We had no idea that things like Facebook and Twitter, and all these other concepts, would ever happen."
As mobile phones go to a fourth generation, with new features in each update, the inventor of the handheld phone said the handset of the future should aim to improve a user's quality of life.
"Technology makes your life better, more convenient, safer, educates you, entertains you, and mostly makes you more productive," said Mr Cooper.
"The cellphone in the long range is going to be embedded under your skin behind your ear along with a very powerful computer who is in effect your slave" predicts Martin Cooper!
