I'm Martin Cooper, call me Marty.
I'm known as the father of the cellphone.
My colleagues and I introduced the very first cellphone to the world.
From my earliest memories, even when I was a little boy,
I was taking things apart.
I saw some kids on the street burning a piece of paper using a magnifying glass.
I wanted to do that.
I broke a Coke bottle and tried to make a lens out of it.
Failed of course
But I always knew I was going to be an engineer.
Well back in the early 70s, I was with Motorola.
We were a leader in two-way radio business.
The radio channels were the basis of what our business was.
AT&T came along and said well, we're going to set you free, freedom!
Now you're gonna be trapped in your car instead of in your home or at your desk.
They'd invented a thing called cellular telephony
that was more spectrally efficient.
And what that means is you could have more people talking
on every radio channel in a city.
And AT&T said they were gonna do every everything.
They were gonna do personal telephone communications.
They were gonna do dispatch the way the police and fire people work.
This is very good, as far as the FCC was concerned,
because then they wouldn't have to worry about licensing every single person.
They would just give one license to AT&T and
they wouldn't have to worry about it anymore.
Well we didn't like that very much at Motorola.
That would have essentially taken over our business.
So we started a battle with them in the 60s.
The battles consisted of filings to the FCC, hearings in Washington.
And around 1972 we heard the FCC is about to make a decision and
we were really worried.
We had to get to the attention of the people in Washington.
We had to demonstrate to them that number one, you didn't have to have a monopoly.
You could have competition.
And the second thing is, the idea of
building a phone that trapped you in a car didn't make any sense to us at all.
We believed, and believe still today,
that freedom means you can talk anywhere,
and we had to show that a personal portable phone was possible.
And the best way to do that is to actually build one.
And that's what stimulated building this first cellphone.
So here we are on the streets of New York, on April 3rd, 1973.
And I'm with a journalist.
And I have to make an impression on the guy.
And I thought you're not gonna take a chance and
call Joel Engel who's my counterpart and my nemesis at AT&T.
So I picked up the phone and I dialed his number.
Amazingly he answered I said, hi Joel, it's Marty Cooper.
Hi Marty, he says.
I'm calling you from a cell phone.
But a real cellphone.
A personal hand-held portable cell phone.
Silence on the other end of the line.
I suspected he was gritting his teeth.
But he was polite, we finished the call,
and that was the first public cellular telephone call.
What I felt when that call worked was a sense of relief.
It worked.
I didn't think at all that this was a historical moment.
This phone had literally thousands of individual parts.
This is before the large scale integrated circuit had been created, the chip.
And so we had to solder each of those individual parts together,
we had an engineer standing by in case something broke, because it was totally unreliable.
I suspect what Joel felt is what he still feels today, annoyance.
Do I think that the cellphone was an important creation in history?
I think it was one of the crucial things,
perhaps as important as the invention of the wheel.
We are still in the infancy of what we call a cellphone and
personal communications.
We're only now learning the kinds of power that we can build into a cell phone and
it will take a couple of generations before we fulfill
the real promise of what a cellphone is.
All cellphones today are sub optimal.
Think about how unnatural it is to want to talk to somebody and
hold this flat piece of material up to your head.
Doesn't make any sense at all.
But in order to capture everything that we're trying to do,
we end up with this form factor.
So I envision a future in which the talking part,
talking's never gonna go away, you're always gonna want to talk to somebody at
some point, and that part may be embedded under your skin behind your ear,
along with a powerful computer that you can talk to.
Someday you'll be able to think to it
and that will be an optimum voice telephone.
There will be other devices throughout your body that will be transmitting your
body functions for fitness or for the health aspects of it.
And they will go through what I call a personal server,
the thing that actually communicates from you to the rest of the world.
So the future is starting to come upon us where they're working on the software.
Getting the software to adapt to people,
getting the phone easier to use, more intuitive and more functional.
I became really interested in artificial intelligence.
I think that there are germs of real
use of artificial intelligence are just starting to become practical.
So I'm thinking of this question of the app, how useless having a million apps.
I mean, how does a person sort through a million apps and
find the one that's suitable for the concept of the app is wrong.
If you really had good artificial intelligence,
you would have a servant, hopefully one that's smarter than you are,
figure out what you need, and coming up with solutions.
We call those solutions apps, but instead of us looking for
the app, the app ought to find us.
What do you think of that?
Funny isnt it? Does that make sense?
I want you to know I've never said that before.
Don't you think that's a great idea, obsoleting the app
by having something that creates the app for you.
I love that.
We created the first portable cell phone in 1973 and here we are 42 years later,
just starting to get into some of the important features.
So all of these things are going to little by little happen, but
they won't happen unless some of us keep dreaming about these things,
and feeding the way to the future.
I would like to be around indefinitely,
so that I could see everything that happens in the future.
But I know that's not gonna happen, and so my replacement for
that is to sit around and dream about those things and
live them in advance of when they happen.