Meet Mr Martin Cooper, the man pictured in the centre. Very possibly he is as important as Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, yet many have never heard of him or mention his name.
After serving in the navy during WWII, Cooper went on to study electrical engineering, joining Motorola in 1954. After many years of stellar work, he then headed the car phone division in the 1970s, then going on to develop the device that made the world’s first cellular phone call in the world.
The story, via Wikipedia, goes like this:
“In 1973, when Motorola installed a base station to handle the first public demonstration of a phone call over the cellular network, the company was trying to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to allocate frequency space to private companies for use in the emerging technology of cellular communications. After some initial testing in Washington for the F.C.C., Cooper and Motorola took the cellular phone technology to New York to demonstrate it to reporters and the public. On April 3, 1973, standing on Sixth Avenue in New York City near the New York Hilton hotel, Cooper made a phone call from a prototype Dyna-Tac handheld cellular phone before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. The phone connected Cooper with the base station on the roof of the Burlington House (now the Alliance Capital Building) across the street from the hotel and into the AT&T land-line telephone system.
As reporters and passers-by watched, he dialed the number and held the phone to his ear.
That first call, placed to Dr. Joel S. Engel, head of research at Bell Labs, began a fundamental technology and communications market shift toward making phone calls to a person instead of to a place. This first phone weighed about 2.5 lb (1.1 kg). It was the product of Cooper’s vision for personal wireless handheld telephone communications, distinct from mobile car phones. Cooper has stated in jest that watching Captain Kirk using his communicator on the television show Star Trek inspired him to develop the handheld mobile phone.
After demonstrating the prototype cell phone to reporters, Cooper allowed some of the reporters to make phone calls to anyone of their choosing to prove that the cell phone could function as a versatile part of the telephone network.
Cooper is considered the inventor of the first handheld cellular phone and the first person to make a phone call in public on a handheld cell phone. Cooper and the engineers who worked for him, and Mitchell are named on the patent “Radio telephone system” filed on October 17, 1973.”
In short, he invented the mobile phone. To think of the wonder of this moment compared to today’s ubiquitous phone coverage and adoption is a difficult comparison to make. At the same time, its nearly 40 years ago that the mobile phone was first born.
And 2011 looks like the year the phone will take another massive leap forward after a decade of advancing networks, devices, software, peripherals, ecosystems, customer experiences and implications around how we deal with money.
NFC payments will be instrumental in not just paying for something, but being paid for something; in not just communicating with someone, but truly connecting; in not just consuming content, but creating it.
This of course has happened before.
The telegraph connected people and democratised access to information. It truly was a disinter mediating technology.
The radio and television came along to give us one delivery of video content, then the set top box came to give us control on what we were offered (but not what we really wanted to watch, or make ourselves).
The internet came along (through our Netscape browsers), we came, we saw, we created content, and the world was never the same again.
And now the mobile, the ultimate ‘mashup’ of the technologies listed above is here. It delivers small packets of information like a telegraph, bundles of content in various forms like radio and tv on a set top box, and mountains of information and data as the internet does today.
The mobile is almost the ultimate web 2.0 tool – it’s the second coming of the internet and all that it offers. It is personalised, rich, seamless, integrated, relatively cheap, and widespread.
Make no mistake, we’re reaching the end of probably the second generation, since Martin Cooper made that famous call to his counterpart Dr Engel, is over.
The next generation of mobile telephony, content consumption and dynamic commerce is about to boom.
