Marty Cooper Interview: The Story of the Cellphone

This is a transcript from a small clip taken from my interview with Marty Cooper, the inventor of the cellphone.

Alexander Bell:

As we approach 150 years since the father of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell made that famous first telephone call to his assistant, Thomas Watson.

It's my absolute pleasure to welcome the father of the cell phone, Marty Cooper, inventor of the cell phone and the first person to ever make a public call with a handheld portable telephone 50 years ago.

Marty, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Marty Cooper:

It's a pleasure to be here, Alex.

Alexander Bell:

Let's get straight in.

Looking back at life in the 1970s, a life without the cell phone, without the internet, Without personal computers.

We did have hardwired telephones everywhere and car phones were starting to appear But what made you so sure that people everywhere would one day want to also own a handheld portable phone?

Marty:

Well Alex we were I Was working for Motorola at the time Motorola made a number of products, but the The most profitable product, the one that was most successful for us were two-way radios.

I don't know what you call them in the UK, but these are the radios that the Bobbies use, firefighters, businesses, anybody that wants to control assets that are on the move.

Alexander:

But presumably, in reading your book, this wasn't a well-known, everybody needs to move to mobile kind of a narrative.

You must have presumably had some pushback and people saying, you know, it'll never catch on, it's a bad idea, we're not there.

So what what was it specifically that really just made you believe that this this is going to happen?

Marty:

Well, my specific motivation didn't have anything to do with this the things we're talking about had to do with, amazingly enough, the idea of Bell Laboratories, which was named after guess who? (Alexander Graham Bell)

And these fellows at Bell Labs, who I became further with as a matter of fact, in 1947 wrote a memo and they pointed out that it was possible to have many different, they didn't call themselves at the time, but many different. They drew these circles showing how you could use a frequency in one spot and then use that same frequency over again, and they said, well, this is an interesting idea, it's not very original, and they put it into their file cabinet.

And 22 years later, the Bell system, once again, this guy Bell is persuasive, busted through this file cabinet, and they decided that they were going to create a new service called cellular communications.

And they decided that this was going to be car telephones.

They were going to put these devices in cars and that it was not going to be much of a business.

They thought that they hired an outfit called McKinsey Consultants and the consultants said; yes, we have studied this problem, and there will be, we think, ultimately, as many as a million people in the world who will have these car telephones.

It turns out they were right.

The maximum market in the world for car telephones was about a million.

But Alex, there are more than 8 billion mobile phones in the world today, and more than 60%, perhaps two-thirds of the population of the world, are using mobile phones.

But it's because these are personal phones.

The mobile phone has become an extension of the person that provides all kinds of capabilities Well, we'll discuss all the different things you can do with a mobile phone, but the most important is communicating with other people.

You were talking about why did we get interested in this?

Well, the Bell System said, first of all, because of this small market, we want a monopoly.

And we were very much opposed, and I am, to monopolies, and the second thing they said is because this market is so small, we would like to also have the ability for this monopoly to use two-way radios, which was in essence saying that we, in a competitive business, were going to be competing with a monopoly.

We didn't like that idea very much at all, and so we decided to take the Bell system on and persuade our Regulators in the case of us It's called the FCC Federal Communications Commission and persuade them of two things. First of all that this whatever business there was going to be it ought to be competitive and the second was that the time for car telephones had passed, we were now ready for personal communications, the ability for a phone to be identified with a person, and when you called somebody, you would get them directly and you were not just calling a place.

And that rivalry obviously ran through that entire period.

Alexander:

Leading up to that day, April 3, 1973, standing on 6th Avenue in New York and making the first ever cell phone call, and you dial Joel Engel, I believe, who was a counterpart at AT&T, and in your book, you mentioned that he was an outspoken critic actually of the work that you were doing over at Motorola.

You also refer to yourself as a dreamer in thebook and continue to say that there is rarely a eureka moment with inventions.

But the story of the Dynatac prototype, which was that first telephone that you produced, being assembled in just under 90 days, leading to this public cell phone call to your rival to help battle against this monopoly.

Well, it kind of sounds like a eureka moment to me.

How did you pull it off?

Marty:

Yeah, well, first of all, I had some great supporters.

The management of Motorola believed very strongly in the concept of innovation, of new things happening.

And they gave me the right to go throughout the company and find all the latest technologies.

And so I went to our Semi-conductor Division, to our Military Division and found all kinds of technologies that were not yet mature, that were still in the research laboratories.

And we reached out to those people and got, well, a number of breakthroughs.

This prototype we made.

There it is.

If I put it this way, you'll think that the thing is huge, and it actually is huge.

So you can see this weighs two kilos, actually one kilo, I'm exaggerating now.

And you can see how big it is.

It had a battery life of about 20 minutes of talking time.

That was not a problem at all, because this thing was so heavy, you couldn't hold it up for more than 20minutes.

But there were a number of breakthroughs we had to do in that 90 days.

And from the starting point, which was actually in November, is when I first approached the person who was going to do the industrial design, the shape of this thing.

And his name was Rudy Krolopp.

I said, Rudy, I want you to build a cell phone.

He said, what's a cell phone?

And I said, I looked over at the phone at his desk and I took a pair of scissors and I cut the cord off the phone until they would see that, that is a cell phone, no wire.

He put together a team of people and they came up with four or five different designs.

They predicted every different kind of model you could imagine.

Folding phones, sliding phones, a capsule phone, all of them more clever than this one, but this one was simple.

And the one thing we did not want to do with this major challenge was to have a complicated phone.

So by the beginning of the year, I had called upon the actual designers that had to put together the complicated circuitry involved in this.

And that's when this project started.

And by March 31st, we actually had a working phone, and on April 3rd, as you mentioned on the streets of New York, we actually made the very first public call.

To watch the interview in full, please visit: https://youtu.be/4fqA5M4JR1g (updated link)