Got a cellphone? Thank him

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This article was published 22/04/2016 (3639 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For someone credited with inventing the cellphone, Martin Cooper is more interested in solving world poverty than capitalizing on the global business he helped create.

Cooper, 87, worked at Motorola for 29 years, eventually becoming the head of research and development at the Illinois-based communications technology company.

He did much of the development of the cellphone for Motorola, and in 1973 he made what was the first cellphone call — to his rival at AT&T as it turned out — eventually helping to create a whole new industry and maybe even a way of life.

He developed several businesses at Motorola, including wireless radio technologies police services around the world are still using.

Cooper is in Winnipeg to speak at an event organized by the Information Communication Technology Association of Manitoba.

Cooper, who spent about 10 years of his youth in Winnipeg, is also being awarded the Manitoba Order of the Buffalo Hunt for his contributions to communication technology.

After that first call, it took another 10 years before cellphones were commercially available — weighing in at about one kilogram and costing about $4,000 each — which was just about the time he left Motorola.

With his wife as his business partner, Cooper went on to start several other companies, including the first cellphone-service billing system, which he sold for $23 million in 1986. He is on the boards of several companies, including Energous Corp., a company that has developed a wireless technology for charging wireless devices.

Cooper is a big fan of wireless.

“My mantra is people are mobile,” he said in an interview with the Free Press. “They are naturally, fundamentally, inherently mobile. They want to move. Anything that constrains them is not natural. If you tell people they need to be connected by a wire, something is wrong.”

Charming and gentlemanly, Cooper is sharp, engaged and current with what is going on in the tech world.

“Being engaged is not necessarily work,” he said. “I get to interact with interesting people. I don’t call that work. I do that as aggressively as I did when I had to earn a living.”

He may have found Steve Jobs to be an interesting person, but Cooper was never a fan of the founder of Apple whom he knew (second-hand) to be an abrasive character.

‘My mantra is people are mobile’ — Martin Cooper, inventor of the cellphone (below)

He is a big fan of the power of competition regarding the impact it has on technology development, and he balks at the notion of Apple’s current status as the biggest company in the world.

As an award-winning and highly acclaimed scientist — Red Herring magazine named him one of the Top 10 Entrepreneurs of 2000, he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering in 2013 among many others — he is as much a humanist as he is a technologist.

His definition of technology is the application of science to create products and services that make people’s lives better. “It is the people that are most important, not the science and the technology,” he said.

When asked what he sees as significant wireless technology advances in the future, he excitedly talks about potential developments in health and education.

For instance, he says just as people use wireless devices such as Fitbit as fitness aids, wireless technology will do much more for our well-being, such as monitoring our genome and flagging illnesses before they begin.

“It will be like having a physical not every year or every five years, but every minute because you are connected,” he said. “We will be able to head off disease before they happen through devices connected through your cellphone.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca