National

Father Of The Cellphone 'Unleashed' World's Callers From Copper Wires

By Hansi Lo Wang

Published July 9, 2012 at 5:48 AM PDT

This story was published more than 12 years ago.

Martin Cooper holds a Motorola DynaTAC, a 1973 prototype of the first hand-held cellular telephone, in San Francisco in 2003. Cooper made the world's first public call from a cellphone in 1973.

They called it "the brick." And Martin Cooper says it really did look like one: 8 inches high, an inch and a half wide, 4 inches deep, and weighing 2 1/2 pounds.

In other words, the world's first hand-held cellphone, the Motorola DynaTAC, weighed the equivalent of about eight iPhones. (Try jamming that into a pocket.)

"The battery life was only 20 minutes," says Cooper, a former vice president at Motorola who has been called the "father of the cellphone." "But that was not a problem because you couldn't hold that heavy thing up for more than 20 minutes."

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The Motorola DynaTAC made its debut on the streets of New York in 1973, when Cooper made the world's first public cellphone call and forever changed the way we stay in touch with each other.

Cooper says it all began with a dream he and his colleagues at Motorola shared. "That dream was that everyone someday would be free to talk wherever they were [and] would be unleashed from the copper wires that tied them to the network," says Cooper, who still develops new technologies in San Diego.

As part of a new tech segment on All Things Considered, Cooper shared some memories from his moment of innovation:

On the FCC announcement that inspired Motorola

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"[The FCC was] about to decide whether [Motorola competitor] AT&T would have a monopoly, and if AT&T had that monopoly, they were going to have cellular phones. But you'd be trapped in your car now instead of in your home or office. And at that moment, I decide that we were going to prove that the world was ready for hand-held, portable telephones, so that people would have the freedom to be anywhere."

On breaking barriers to create the first cellphone

"First of all, there were no large-scale integrated circuits, so we had to make that phone with thousands of individual parts. The frequency band the phone was in had never been used before, so we had to invent new devices, a new antenna. And furthermore, we had to come up with a form factor that could be held in someone's hand and that would look somewhat like a telephone."