Have you ever thought what your lives would be without a cell-phone nowadays?
All the mobile information and technology we are living in, happened thanks to the wonderful invention of Martin Cooper, electronic engineer and inventor from US, precisely the man who conceived and introduced the cell-phone almost 40 years ago.
The following video documentary has been developed by David Friedman for PBS and is a short portrait and presentation of this brilliant man:
- Martin Cooper worked as director of R&D of Motorola, and he’s the first person who made a phone call from a cell in public, in 1973, with a prototype of Motorola DynaTac 800X, (although lasted almost 10 years in enter to the market). He called his colleague-competitor from Bell Labs to let him know the great achievement.
- During the same year (1973), the famous magazine “Popular Science” dedicated one of its covers to this amazing upcoming revolution.
- In 2009 he won the Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific research.
- He runs Dyna LLC, an incubator for projects related to the development of telephone networks.
As he explains, the principle was very simple: breaking the city into a lot of small areas, called “cells” and being able to move from one cell to another and having a continuous conversation.
“What’s important about any technology is that the technology is hopefully invisible but at least transparent and maybe intuitive” he says, and also that “the purpose of technology is to make your life better”.
Martin Cooper obtained the patent in 1975, from the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office). If you are interested in knowing better the inventiveness of this man, you can find the document of the publication : “Radio telephone system”.
