Martin Cooper, who turns 82 on December 26th, is an electrical engineer – having gained his Master’s degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1957. He began work with Motorola in 1954, and it was during his tenure there, in 1973, that he conceived the first cellular phone. He then spent the next decade working to bring it to market.
Cooper’s inspiration for undertaking the project was the Star Trek television series, in which a small, hand-held “communicator” device was used very much in the manner of a portable phone. Once Cooper had successfully tested his phone prototype, there was an instant shift in thinking among telecommunications gurus, who had for years said that telephoning would depend on the phone’s location, rather than the caller. At the time, so-called “land lines” and telephone booths were the only means of placing calls, so Cooper recalled with some amusement, in an interview he gave to EngineeringCrossing, the public’s initial reaction to his walking down the street with a portable telephone: