Father of the Cell Phone

The Economist, June 4, 2009

Marty Cooper, the pioneer of mobile telephony, has spent his entire career pushing wireless communications to new heights.

Unless you work in the telecoms industry, you are unlikely to have heard of Marty Cooper. He is hardly a household name. But his influence has been felt across the world, because he is the engineer who took the cellular technology used in the car phones of the 1970s and decided that phones ought to be small enough to be portable. His determination led to the first prototype, in 1973, and then to the first commercial mobile phone in 1983. “Marty is the most influential person no one has ever heard of,” says Robert McDowell, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, America’s telecoms regulator.

 The son of Ukrainian immigrants, Cooper spent much of his youth in Depression-era Chicago. He says he never went hungry, but his parents made only a modest living selling merchandise door-to-door, on installment plans. To finance his education at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Cooper joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, and ended up on a navy destroyer during the Korean War. Cooper later switched to submarines and spent a year and a half stationed in Hawaii. He started working at Motorola in 1954 and had earned his Masters in Electrical Engineering at night school by 1957, again at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Cooper credits his family for his subsequent success. “My resourcefulness and persistence come from watching my folks digging in,” he says. “My mother was a dynamo. She would talk to anyone. She never walked slowly. And I am always leaning forward into the wind.”

It’s an apt image for Cooper’s career, during which he has repeatedly spotted what lies ahead and led others towards the creation of new industries. In the 1960s, he was instrumental in the establishment of the high-capacity paging market, for example, turning paging from a technology used in single buildings to one that could stretch across cities. He also helped popularise the quartz watch, by fixing a flaw in the crystals Motorola made for its radios, and then encouraging the firm to mass-produce the first crystals for use in watches.

The idea for the mobile phone first occurred to Cooper in the early 1970s, at a time when cellular phones were unwieldy devices built into car dashboards and attached to a box of equipment - a two-way radio and a power supply. There were only a few radio channels available on which to make calls, and users often had to wait a long time for one to become free.

Carried Away

Once Motorola put Cooper in charge of its car phone division, he decided that such products should not merely be able to move around in cars, but should be small and light enough to be carried around the rest of the time. “I became a zealot for products being portable,” he says. From idea to prototype took 90 days in 1972 as Cooper sponsored a design contest among Motorola engineers. “We ended up picking the least glamorous phone,” says Cooper. “It was the simplest.”

That device lead to the famous phone call on April 3, 1973 after Motorola had hosted a press conference to introduce the phone at the Hilton in New York. Cooper’s decision to take it - and a journalist - onto the street to make a demonstration call was a stroke of marketing genius. Joel Engel, the rival engineer whom Cooper called at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories that day, says he does not remember taking the call. But it was the first public call on a hand-held mobile phone. “I was talking and stepped into the street and almost got hit by a car,” Cooper recalls with an impish grin—the first hint of mobile telecommunications’ distracting downside.

The handset, called a DynaTAC, had 35 minutes of talk time and weighed one kilogram (2.2 pounds). Four iterations later, Cooper’s team had reduced the DynaTAC’s weight by half, and it was finally launched in 1983 with a list price of about $4,000. Cooper had fought for a decade with Motorola’s bean-counters, and had become head of research and development in 1976. “It cost so much and took so long,” admits Cooper. “But my focus has always been on the long-term technology vision.”

Travis Marshall, a retired Motorola executive, [said] most people thought cellular phones would only ever be business tools. “Marty kept preaching that the cost would come down and that it would become a consumer product,” he recalls. By the time Motorola started selling the world’s first hand-held mobile phone to consumers, Cooper had already left the company.

Years later, Cooper got a call from Richard Roy, a researcher at Stanford University who had an idea: smart antennas. By precisely steering radio waves from a base-station towards a mobile device, it is possible to establish a faster, more reliable link—and to support more users at once, by sending different beams to users in different directions using the same radio frequencies. Inspired by Roy’s ideas, Cooper agreed to lead a new company, ArrayComm, set up in 1992. Having developed its own wireless-broadband system, it now focuses on providing smart-antenna technology to other equipment-makers, for use in cellular and WiMAX networks. “ArrayComm has the same problem as many technology companies,” says Arthur Lipper, a Wall Street veteran - “They are ahead of the market, and this is an expensive place to be.” As Cooper himself puts it, “You could say I was visionary. Or you could say I was too far ahead.”

Unusual for a technology visionary, however, Cooper manages to keep the needs of users in mind, rather than becoming enamoured with technology. He recognised early on that mobile phones would offer people greater freedom and flexibility in their working and personal lives. A further example is provided by the Jitterbug, a handset designed by his wife, Arlene Harris, which has big buttons and basic features and is designed for elderly consumers. As handset-makers crammed more and more features into their phones, Cooper and his wife realised that for some people, less is more.

Beyond the Mobile Phone

Now 80, Cooper’s vigour is undimmed. Despite his achievements, he retains an endearing sense of graciousness and humility. He makes a point of replying to the many children who contact him for comments for use in their school reports.

Perhaps surprisingly, Cooper thinks the real impact of mobile communications is yet to come. There are already glimpses of the potential for mobile data in the success of the BlackBerry e-mail device and the iPhone, with its vast selection of downloadable software. But Cooper feels strongly that such applications will be more likely to flourish if the world’s mobile networks, and the applications that run over them, are developed and managed by different companies, in an open model that mimics the Internet. Leaving application development to the open market—competition will flourish, “so that consumers’ lives are improved,” says Cooper. Open access, he believes, “is just good business”. It may be another case where Cooper has correctly identified the outcome, but it takes longer than expected to materialise.

But that seems to be his role. “Marty created the wireless industry,” says Tim McDonald, a former fund manager at Merrill Lynch and one-time board member at ArrayComm. “His greatest strength is his ability to inspire the vision for where the wireless industry can go.”