The American engineer Mark Cooper is considered one of the leading pioneers of the wireless communications industry, envisioning a world in which people would communicate wherever they were and not from fixed locations. Without his work in the mid-20th century, the mobile communications industry would arguably be non-existent.
“People want to talk to other people — not a house, or an office, or a car. Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire. It is that freedom we sought to vividly demonstrate in 1973.”
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On the 38th anniversary of the first cell phone call, journalist Bob Greene wrote an article for CNN commemorating Cooper’s pioneering work. During this interview, he recounted the way that Cooper explained the thinking behind the concept of the mobile phone.
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The concept for the “personal telephone”, as Cooper described it, came from shifting the concept of a telephone number from something that was fixed to a location or infrastructure to something that represented an individual.
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This notion, which broke away from the absolute necessity of being tethered to a copper wire, gave individuals (initially working professionals) absolute mobility and freedom to communicate from wherever they were.
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Cooper headed Motorola’s communications systems division in the 1970s and conceived of the first portable cellular phone in 1973, which began a 10-year process of bringing the device to market.
He was the lead inventor named on the ‘radio telephone system’ patent filed in October 1973, but several months earlier he had demonstrated to the press the first handheld cellular phone call in public. He used a prototype DynaTAC device, which he used to call a base station that had been installed on the rooftop of the then-Burlington House in New York.
It’s now impossible to envisage how the business world could have been shaped without his pioneering work, with hundreds of millions of units shipping each year. Indeed, this capability to communicate from anywhere – and anytime – has led to immeasurable productivity benefits over the last few decades.
