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2010-09-26 07:25:12
Martin Cooper may not be a household name, but his invention is familiar to
more than half the planet's population who own a 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.
$10,000 phone
He told Click 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.
We joked that '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'
Martin Cooper
"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 industrial designers did a superb job, but by the time the engineers got
done we ended up with two and a half pounds.
"A very substantial part of that first phone was in fact battery which weighed
four or five times more than an entire cellphone now," he said.
"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."
Bring freedom
After the phone's production, the bigger obstacle became adapting the small
infrastructure, used for car phones at the time, to support mobile phone calls.
"The challenge was to create the network with the promise at that time that we
only needed three megahertz of spectrum, the equivalent of five TV channels to
cover the world.
Man using mobile phone in the 1980s
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."
Modern monsters
A new generation of so-called smartphones have revolutionised the mobile phone
industry and changed the way people use them.
The technology in handsets has shifted in focus from voice calls to include
other functions such as a portable media player, web browser and camera among
others.
By cramming in a whole host of technologies, Mr Cooper believes operators and
phone manufacturers have turned the handheld phone into a "monstrosity".
Samsung, HTC and BlackBerry smartphones
Mr Cooper believes smartphones will become chips to implant behind the ear
"The instruction book is now bigger and heavier than the phone itself," he
said. "Good technology is intuitive - the cellphone forces you to become an
engineer."
But he still enjoys trying out the latest smartphones, because he wants to
understand the innovations happening in the phone market.
"You have to immerse yourself into a product and use it in order to really
understand it and that's why I have a new cellphone every month or two."
'Slave' implant
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 future of cellular telephony is to make people's lives better - the most
important way, in my view, will be the opportunity to revolutionise
healthcare," he added.
"We could not have predicted the annoyance that people have when the phone
rings at the opera, but it doesn't take a cellular phone to make people be
rude."
In terms of the physical development of mobile phones, which have already
shrunk from the size of a brick, he believes future users will be able to
dispense altogether with the device.
"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".