The basic issue is that people are fundamentally mobile. So the idea of having wires to make
a conversation is really not very natural.
My name is Marty Cooper. I conceived of and introduced the first portable -- oh, excuse me.
Hello? Oh, hi, George.
George, I'm really tied up at the moment. Do you mind if I call you back?
Oh, thank you so much. Bye now.
As I was saying. I conceived of and introduced the first cellular telephone in April of 1973.
Now the concept of cellular telephony is really very simple. It breaks the city up into a
lot of small areas which being engineers we had to come up with a new name and we called
them cells. And the second concept is being able to move from one cell to another and
having a continuous conversation.
The first public cellular call was made in New York. I was with Motorola at that time
and I thought a dramatic thing to do was to call my counterpart at AT&T. So I dialed the
phone, and I said,
"Hi, Joel. It's Marty Cooper." He said, "Hi, Marty."
I said, "I'm calling you from my cell phone." And there was silence at the other end of the line.
The idea for the shape of the first phone started out with me approaching Motorola's
design group. I told them that I wanted to have a really dazzling design. And two weeks
later they had a flip phone, they had a slider phone. But we selected this phone because
it was simple.
What's important about any technology is that the technology is hopefully invisible but
at least transparent and maybe intuitive. Think about it. The purpose of technology
is to make your life better. Most cell phones don't do that very well. In fact, they force
us to become engineers, to learn a bunch of new things. And we shouldn't have to do that.
The ideal phone would be one where I would just talk to the phone, or maybe the phone
would read my mind, and it would do things to make my life better. And all of us have
these complicated phones. And they all try to be universal. If you try to build a device
that does all things for all people, it won't do any of them very well. So I think that's
where we are with cell phones today.