Martin Cooper ( inventor ) - wikipedia Martin Cooper ( inventor ) Martin Cooper Martin Cooper in 2010 ( 1928 - 12 - 26 ) December 26, 1928 ( age 89 ) Chicago, Illinois, United States Residence Del Mar, California, United States Nationality American Education Illinois Institute of Technology ( B.S.E.E. ; M.S.E.E. ) Occupation Inventor Entrepreneur Executive Employer Motorola Founder & CEO of ArrayComm Co-Founder & Chairman of Dyna LLC Known for Inventing handheld cellular mobile phone making world 's first handheld cellular mobile phone call. Spouse ( s ) Arlene Harris ( m. 1991 ) Awards Marconi Prize ( 2013 ) Website www.dynallc.com Martin `` Marty '' Cooper ( born December 26, 1928 ) is an American engineer. He is a pioneer in the wireless communications industry, especially in radio spectrum management, with eleven patents in the field. While at Motorola in the 1970s, Cooper invented the first handheld cellular mobile phone ( distinct from the car phone ) in 1973 and led the team that developed it and brought it to market in 1983. He is considered the `` father of the ( handheld ) cell phone '' and is also cited as the first person in history to make a handheld cellular phone call in public. Cooper is co-founder of numerous communications companies with his wife and business partner Arlene Harris ; He is co-founder and current Chairman of Dyna LLC, in Del Mar, California. Cooper also sits on committees supporting the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and the United States Department of Commerce. Contents 1 Education 2 Career 2.1 Cellular Business Systems 2.2 Dyna LLC 2.3 GreatCall, Inc 2.4 Arraycomm 3 Cooper 's law 4 Publications 4.1 Latest publications 5 Awards and affiliations 6 References 7 External links Education Martin was born in Hernando to Ukrainian Jewish Immigrants. He graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology ( IIT ) in 1950. After graduating he served as a submarine officer during the Korean War. In 1957, he earned his master 's degree from IIT in electrical engineering and in 2004 received an honorary doctorate degree from IIT. He serves on the university 's board of trustees. Career This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. ( March 2017 ) Motorola Cooper left his first job at Teletype Corporation in Chicago in 1954 and joined Motorola, Inc. ( Schaumburg, Illinois ) as a senior development engineer in the mobile equipment group. He developed products including the first cellular - like portable handheld police radio system, produced for the Chicago police department in 1967. By the early 1970s, Cooper headed up Motorola 's communications systems division. Here he conceived of the first portable cellular phone in 1973 and led the 10 - year process of bringing it to market. Car phones had been in limited use in large U.S. cities since the 1930s but Cooper championed cellular telephony for more general personal, portable communications. He believed the cellular phone should be a `` personal telephone -- something that would represent an individual so you could assign a number ; not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home, but to a person. '' While it has been stated Cooper 's vision for the device was inspired by Captain James T. Kirk using his Communicator on the television show Star Trek, Cooper himself later said that his actual inspiration was Dick Tracy 's wrist radio. Top management at Motorola supported Cooper 's mobile phone concept, investing $100 million between 1973 and 1993 before any revenues were realized. Cooper assembled a team that designed and assembled a product in less than 90 days. That original handset, called the DynaTAC 8000x ( DYNamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage ) weighed 2.5 pounds ( 1.1 kg ), measured 10 inches ( 25 cm ) long and was dubbed `` the brick '' or `` the shoe '' phone. A very substantial part of the DynaTAC was the battery which weighed four to five times more than a modern cell phone. The phone had only 20 minutes of talk time before requiring a 10 - hour recharge but according to Cooper, `` The battery lifetime was n't really a problem because you could n't hold that phone up for that long ! '' By 1983 and after four iterations, the handset was reduced to half its original weight. Cooper is the lead inventor named on `` radio telephone system '' filed on October 17, 1973, with the U.S. Patent Office and later issued as U.S. Patent 3,906,166. John Francis Mitchell, Motorola 's Chief of Portable Communication Products ( and Cooper 's Manager and Mentor ) and the engineers who worked for Cooper and Mitchell are also named on the patent. On April 3, 1973, Cooper and Mitchell demonstrated two working phones to the media and to passers - by prior to walking into a scheduled press conference at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan. Standing on Sixth avenue near the Hilton, Cooper made the first handheld cellular phone call in public from the prototype DynaTAC. The call connected him to a base station Motorola had installed on the roof of the Burlington House ( now the AllianceBernstein Building ) and into the AT&T land - line telephone system. Reporters and onlookers watched as Cooper dialed the number of his chief competitor Dr. Joel S. Engel at ATT. `` Joel, this is Marty. I 'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone. '' That public demonstration landed the DynaTAC on the July 1973 cover of Popular Science Magazine. As Cooper recalls from the experience : `` I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter -- probably one of the most dangerous things I have ever done in my life. '' Cooper holding a DynaTAC cellphone in 2007 That first cell phone began a fundamental technology and communications market shift to making phone calls to a person instead of to a place. Bell Labs had introduced the idea of cellular communications in 1947, but their first systems were limited to car phones which required roughly 30 pounds ( 12 kg ) of equipment in the trunk. Motorola gained Federal Communications Commission ( FCC ) approval for cellular licenses to be assigned to competing entities and prevented an AT&T monopoly on cellular service. Cooper worked at Motorola for 29 years ; building and managing both its paging and cellular businesses. He also led the creation of trunked mobile radio, quartz crystals, oscillators, liquid crystal displays, piezo - electric components, Motorola A.M. stereo technology and various mobile and portable two - way radio product lines. Cooper rose to Vice-President and Corporate Director of Research and Development at Motorola. In addition to his work on the mobile cellular phone, he was instrumental in expanding the technology of pagers from use within a single building to use across multiple cities. Cooper also worked with inventor Clifford L. Rose to fix a flaw in quartz crystals used in Motorola 's radios which encouraged the Company to mass - produce the first crystals used in wrist watches. Cellular business systems In 1983, the first commercial cellular phone service began operation in the United States and the DynaTAC phone became available to consumers at a list price of around $4,000 ( $9,000 in 2011 dollars ) but Cooper left Motorola before the launch. That year, he co-founded Cellular Business Systems, Inc. ( CBSI ), which came to dominate the cellular billing industry with 75 percent market share. In 1986, Cooper sold CBSI to Cincinnati Bell ( now Convergys ) for $23 million. Dyna LLC Cooper and his wife Arlene Harris founded Dyna LLC in 1986 as a home base for their developmental and support activities for the new companies, Subscriber Computing Inc., Cellular Pay Phone, Inc. ( CPPI ), SOS Wireless Communications and Accessible Wireless ; the later two of which together created the underpinning for the creation of GreatCall, were all launched from Dyna LLC. From his Dyna headquarters Cooper continues to write and lecture about wireless communications, technological innovation, the Internet and R&D management. He serves on industry, civic and national governmental groups including the U.S. Department of Commerce Spectrum Advisory Committee that advises the Secretary of Commerce of the United States on spectrum policy and the Federal Communication Commission 's ( FCC ) Technological Advisory Council. GreatCall, Inc In 1986 Cooper co-founded Cellular Payphone Inc. ( CPPI ), the parent company of GreatCall, Inc., Innovator of the Jitterbug cell phone ( in partnership with Samsung ). GreatCall is the first complete end - to - end value - added service provider in the cellular industry to focus on simplicity with primary emphasis on boomers and senior citizens. Arraycomm In 1992 Cooper co-founded Arraycomm a developer of software for mobile antenna technologies. Under his leadership, the Company grew from a seed - funded startup in San Jose, California, into the world leader in smart antenna technology with 400 patents issued or pending, worldwide. Cooper 's Law Cooper found that the ability to transmit different radio communications simultaneously and in the same place has grown at the same pace since Guglielmo Marconi 's first transmissions in 1895. This led Cooper to formulate the Law of Spectral Efficiency, otherwise known as Cooper 's Law. The Law states that the maximum number of voice conversations or equivalent data transactions that can be conducted in all of the useful radio spectrum over a given area doubles every 30 months. Publications Latest publications `` The Myth of Spectrum Scarcity '' Position Paper, March 2010. `` Mobile WiMax -- Fourth - Generation Wireless, '' Bechtel Communications Technical Journal, September 2007. `` The Need for Simplicity, '' in the anthology `` Mobile Persuasion : 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change, '' published by Stanford University in 2007. `` Antennas Get Smart '' in Scientific American, July 2003. `` Personal Communications in 2025 '' for Eta Kappa Nu Electrical and Computer Engineering Honor Society, Autumn 2005. `` Everyone is Wrong '' in Technology Review, June 2001. Awards and affiliations Mensa. 1984 -- IEEE Centennial Medal and Fellow 1995 -- Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award 1996 -- Radio Club of America Fred Link Award and Life Fellow with the International Engineering Consortium 2000 -- `` Red Herring '' Magazine Top Ten Entrepreneurs of 2000 2000 -- RCR Wireless News Hall of Fame Inaugural Member 2002 -- American Computer Museum George Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Award 2002 -- Wireless Systems Design Industry Leader Award 2006 -- CITA Emerging Technologies Award 2007 -- Wireless World Research Forum Fellow 2007 -- Global Spec Great Moments Engineering Award 2008 -- CE Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame Award October 2008 -- Wireless History Foundation, Top U.S. Wireless Innovators of All Time. 2009 -- Prince of Asturias Award for scientific and technical research. 2009 -- Life Trustee, Illinois Institute of Technology 2010 -- Radio Club of America, Lifetime Achievement Award October 2010 -- Member, National Academy of Engineering 2011 -- Inaugural Mikhail Gorbachev : The Man Who Changed the World Awards Nominee 2011 -- Webby Award for Lifetime Achievement 2012 -- Washington Society of Engineers, Washington Award 2013 -- Charles Stark Draper Prize, National Academy of Engineering 2013 -- Marconi Prize 2013 -- Honorary doctorate awarded by the students and the rector of Hasselt University on the occasion of the university 's 40th anniversary 2014 IEEE - Eta Kappa Nu Eminent Member ( 1 ) References ^ Jump up to : Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2008. encyclopedia.com Jump up ^ Companies Try to Create Room on Radio Spectrum, The New York Times, July 6, 2012 ^ Jump up to : A Chat With the Man Behind the Mobiles, BBC, April 21, 2003 ^ Jump up to : Meet Marty Cooper, the Inventor of the Mobile Phone, BBC, April 23, 2010 ^ Jump up to : Father of the Cell Phone, Economist, June 4, 2009 Jump up ^ The Cell Phone : Marty Cooper 's Big Idea, CBS News 60 Minutes, June 11, 2010 ^ Jump up to : 38 years ago he made the first cell phone call, CNN. April 3, 2011 Jump up ^ Wireless Hall of Fame -- Arlene Harris, RCR Wireless, May 26, 2007 Jump up ^ Carriers Warn of Crisis in Mobile Spectrum, The New York Times, April 17, 2012 Jump up ^ http://www.jewoftheweek.net/2011/12/14/jews-of-the-week-martin-cooper-joel-engel/ Jump up ^ http://jewishcurrents.org/april-3-the-first-cell-phone-call/ Jump up ^ http://www.amuseum.org/jahf/nomination/nomination2.html ^ Jump up to : Oehmke, Ted ( January 6, 2000 ) Cell Phone Ruin the Opera ? Meet the Culprit, The New York Times Jump up ^ Reed, Brad ( May 9, 2011 ) Meet the guy who made the first cellphone call 40 years ago today, Network World. Jump up ^ Best Inventions of 2007, Time. Jump up ^ `` How William Shatner Changed the World -- Martin Cooper, mobile phone inventor ''. Youtube. Retrieved April 4, 2013. Jump up ^ `` Video interview with Marty Cooper ''. Scene World. Retrieved March 1, 2015. Jump up ^ Inventor of the Cell Phone Says No to AT&T - Mobile, Yes to Apps, and More, PC Magazine, April 15, 2011 ^ Jump up to : Inventor of Cell Phone : We Knew Someday Everybody Would Have One, CNN Tech, July 9, 2010 Jump up ^ Cooper, Martin et al. `` All Signaling '' U.S. Patent 3,906,166, Issued September 1, 1975 ^ Jump up to : April 3, 1973 : Motorola Calls AT&T... by Cell, Wired, April 3, 2008 Jump up ^ Twitter, Telegram and Email : Famous First Lines, BBC News, March 21, 2011 Jump up ^ Cooper 's Calling, ITP Net, April 21, 2010 ^ Jump up to : Antennas Get Smart, Scientific American, June 9, 2003 Jump up ^ `` Everyone Is Wrong '' MIT Technology Review Jump up ^ `` They 're Accomplished, They 're Famous, and They 're MENSANS ''. Mensa Bulletin. American Mensa ( 476 ) : 25. July 2004. ISSN 0025 - 9543. Jump up ^ `` The fathers of the mobile phone and email, Prince of Asturias Award Laureates for Technical and Scientific Research '' ( Press release ). Fundación Príncipe de Asturias. June 17, 2009. Archived from the original on July 16, 2012. Retrieved June 17, 2009. Jump up ^ The Marconi Society Jump up ^ Academische Openingszitting 2013 -- 2014. uhasselt.be. September 27, 2013 External links Marty Cooper interviewed on the TV show Triangulation on the TWiT.tv network MartyMobile on Twitter WorldCat Identities GND : 1036622525 VIAF : 304334402 Retrieved from `` https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martin_Cooper_(inventor)&oldid=860704408 '' Categories : American communications businesspeople American inventors 1928 births Living people People from Chicago Illinois Institute of Technology alumni American naval personnel of the Korean War American people of Ukrainian - Jewish descent Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Mensans IEEE Centennial Medal laureates Jewish inventors Hidden categories : Use mdy dates from June 2016 Articles with hCards Articles needing additional references from March 2017 All articles needing additional references Wikipedia articles with GND identifiers Wikipedia articles with VIAF identifiers Talk Contents About Wikipedia Azərbaycanca বাংলা Català Čeština Dansk Deutsch Español فارسی Français Galego हिन्दी Italiano עברית Malagasy Bahasa Melayu Nederlands Polski Português Русский Shqip Suomi தமிழ் తెలుగు Українська Tiếng Việt 中文 18 more Edit links This page was last edited on 22 September 2018, at 14 : 01 ( UTC ). 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Question: who invented the first cell phone ever made
Answer: Martin Cooper