The man who invented the first portable handset is considered to be Martin Cooper. His carreer started at Teletype, a subsidiary of Western Electric. He was hired by Motorola in 1954. Cooper cooperated fixing a defect in the quartz crystals Motorola made for its radios. Cooper focused his work on the development of portable products. This includes the first handheld police radios, built for the Chicago police department in 1967. At the beginning of the ‘70s, Cooper was charged to lead Motorola’s cellular research. That is when Cooper had his vision of mobile phones used everywhere, and not only in cars.
<-300x250 Medium Rectangle - center->
Thanks to Cooper's passionate research, the invention of the first handheld cell phone lasted only 90 days in 1973, when first portable cellular 800 MHz phone prototype was created. After doing some testing in Washington, Cooper and Motorola presented their new technology in New York, in order to demonstrate to reporters and the public how it works. The first call Cooper ever made was to his rival, Bell Labs head of research, Joel Engel. Cooper made the phone call from a prototype Dyna-Tac handheld cellular phone before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. On April 3, 1973, standing on Sixth Avenue in New York City, Cooper was connected through this phone call with the station of the Burlington House (which is now the Alliance Capital Building) across the street. This date goes into history as being the day when the first phone call made from a portable handset.
<-300x250 Medium Rectangle - center->
Thanks to Cooper's passionate research, the invention of the first handheld cell phone lasted only 90 days in 1973, when first portable cellular 800 MHz phone prototype was created. After doing some testing in Washington, Cooper and Motorola presented their new technology in New York, in order to demonstrate to reporters and the public how it works. The first call Cooper ever made was to his rival, Bell Labs head of research, Joel Engel. Cooper made the phone call from a prototype Dyna-Tac handheld cellular phone before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. On April 3, 1973, standing on Sixth Avenue in New York City, Cooper was connected through this phone call with the station of the Burlington House (which is now the Alliance Capital Building) across the street. This date goes into history as being the day when the first phone call made from a portable handset.
This first phone to be produced weighed about 2.5 lb. Cooper declared that the invention of the cell phone was inspired by watching Captain Kirk using his communicator on the television show Star Trek. Cooper wanted to prove that the cell phone could function as a resourceful part of the telephone network. Therefore, after demonstrating the way the protoype works to reporters, Cooper allowed some of them to make some phone calls. The original Motorola DynaTAC handset, weighed 2.2 pounds and had 35 minutes of talk time. Cooper has stated that “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.” By 1983 and after four trials, Cooper’s team had reduced the handset’s weight by half. The list price was around $4,000. Cooper left Motorola before they started selling handheld mobile phones to consumers.
In 1995, Cooper obtained the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for the technological innovations he made in the communication field. Besides this, Cooper is also a member of Mensa. In 2009, Cooper received also the Prince of Asturias Award for scientific and technical research. In February 2010, Cooper was selected to the National Academy of Engineering.32
No comments:
Post a Comment