The Man Who Placed the First Mobile Call 50 Years Ago Talks Phones of the Future

Fifty years ago today, Martin Cooper, who then headed Motorola’s Portable Products division, stood on Sixth Avenue outside the New York Hilton, demonstrating the first cell phone for the first time in public, calling a competitor at AT&T prior to a press conference.

I recently had an opportunity to talk to Cooper about what led to that call, the creation of the modern cell phone, and where he sees phones going into the future.

Looking Back

We talked about how car phones had been around for years before then, although they were much bigger and much less capable. Cooper recalls how from 1950 to 1983, there were only about 50 radio channels available for car phones, so in cities like Chicago or Los Angeles you could only have a few hundred subscribers. During busy times, you often could not get a channel.

He notes that the concept of cellular telephones uses smaller cells that repeat the use of a spectrum within a city. The idea goes back to a Bell Labs memo from 1947, and he said that in 1969, AT&T went to the FCC and broached the idea of using cellular with a lot more channels, but only if it got a monopoly. It believed this was going to be a small market and wanted to use the concept for things like car phones. Motorola objected to both things, he says, believing it was going to be a bigger market and rather different. “We thought that was ridiculous because I was ready to have a handheld phone that was an extension of the person.”

Cooper, who started working for Motorola in 1954, was running the Portable Products group in 1972 when the company decided to make a test device.

At that time, Motorola was the leader in two-way radio communications, and the portable products division was focused on personal communications. While there, Cooper said he “realized the concept of the freedom that you get from being able to talk from anywhere at any time.”

The company had lots of research projects going on, but it wasn’t until late December 1972, that work really began on a prototype handheld portable phone. Cooper’s staff had 22 engineers working on the phone itself, led by Don Linder, but Cooper also brought in technology from other parts of the company. He got the semiconductor division to give him a large-scale integrated circuit to manage the 436 channels the phone supported, more than had ever been put into a portable device before that. He got the antenna group to give him a new antenna. He got the filter group to give them a new, smaller duplexer; at the time duplexers—which let you talk and listen at the same time—were about twice as big and heavy as the whole cell phone, he said. He then got the design group to create several alternatives. The biggest issue, he says, was trying to get this all done in a three-month time frame, which required a lot of persuasion.

“It really was a company effort,” he says. “It took a lot of people to execute that vision.”

The product was first shown on April 3, 1973, but it was a hand-wired unit, not something that could be produced economically. It would be another decade before cell phones as we know them entered the market.

Cooper said that to make a viable phone, you need integrated circuits for practically every part of the device, but that wasn’t available until the early 1980s. In 1981, the FCC indicated they were ready to allocate 600+ channels for cellular communications. That year, Motorola created a working and producible cell phone. In September 1983, commercial cell phones went on sale, with the first model— The DynaTac 8000—selling for $4,000.

The DynaTac 8000
(Credit: Tim Boyle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Today, even the highest-end smartphones cost a lot less; and Cooper points out that in many countries, you can buy cell phones for $50 that are perfectly usable and if you want a phone that just talks, listens, and texts you can do a lot better than that. Of course, today’s phones are much smaller and lighter—the Dynatac 8000 weighed about 3 pounds and was roughly the size of a shoe—and much more capable.  

Looking Ahead

Cooper has several complaints about the current cell phone market, saying that “insisting that everybody has to have a smartphone with a multi-million number of apps I think is ridiculous.”

He believes “there ought to be phones designed for every kind of person.” For example, his wife Arlene Harris(Opens in a new window) invented the Lively phone(Opens in a new window), which is marketed to seniors. He’s particularly critical of the carriers, who he said act like monopolies.

“Every phone ought to have an artificial intelligence that looks at your habits, the way you use the phone, what your requirements are, differences between you and other people, and generally either creates the apps or finds the apps for you. To me, that is what a humanized cell phone is,” Cooper says.

He also thinks cell phones are too hard to use today: “The idea of having a flat piece of glass sticking against your round head with your hand in an awkward position – that’s not human design.”

In the long run, he thinks much of the phone should be embedded under your skin, as part of your body, and use your body’s energy to charge, rather than plugging it in every day. He’s a fan of Bluetooth headsets—Cooper uses a Bluetooth hearing aid himself—for bringing the audio in, and believes that ultimately, we’ll use glasses for the video.

He notes that up until recently, more and more features were added to phones every year, but you can only have so many pixels and so many cameras. He believes that phone makers are running out of new features, and that “they’re going to have to do some of these new features that I think are human-oriented.”

Most importantly, he says that cell phones up until now have been in what he calls “the game stage.” They improve productivity for people all over the world, and can influence health care, but the big strides forward will be made in the next 50 years. They will happen in health care, education, safety, but mostly in productivity, with improved collaboration.

“You can wrap it up,” he says, “I think that the cellular revolution is just about to start.”