35 years of cell phones
By: Drivers.com staff
Date: 2008-04-01
Martin Cooper reckons walking across the street at 56 th and Lexington in Manhattan while making a call on his the brick-sized wireless mobile phone was one of the most dangerous things he ever did. Maybe he never drove using one.
His series of phone calls on April 3, 1973 is believed to be the first use of a handheld, mobile 'cell' phone. However, the idea of a cellular technology in which calls would be handed off to another cell as the caller moved around had been in the works since 1946, when Bell Labs conceived the idea.
However, it was Cooper and Motorola that designed and built the prototype Cooper used for his street calls, and it was 10 years before the first commercial cellular phones were introduced in 1983.
Cooper feels that the American free market model of development has been superior to the European model of mostly state-controlled monopolies. He cites competition and lower prices as the result.
However, he admits there are problems with the U.S. cell carriers who have competed on price but forced users to accept an ever-increasing number of dropped calls. Many people consider the European system to be superior.
Cooper doesn�t approve of the trend to gimmicks such as MP3 players, cameras and voice recorders and thinks manufacturers are favoring these over improved services.
The future
Wireless devices embedded in people's bodies that would transmit body characteristics and send early warning signs or disease or illness to a doctor or a computer are part of Coopers vision of the future. "You could get diagnosed and cured instantly and wirelessly."
And maybe, he told Reuters reporter Sinead Carew recently, the human body could supply the power as well, "Here you've got this wonderful power supply called the human body that's generating energy all the time," he said. "Wouldn't it be wonderful to have these devices built into you and powered by your body?"
The 79-year-old Cooper is now chief executive of ArrayComm, a wireless software firm he started in 1992. The greatest obstacle to his sci-fi future-vision? "It's not really the technology, it's the people. People are really conservative," he told Carew.
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