On the line with Martin Cooper, inventor of the very first cell phone
Photos Jeff Antenore
Fifty years ago, Martin Cooper stood on a Manhattan street corner, pulled out a mammoth transmitter-like contraption, punched in a few numbers and dialed his competitor — who became the first-ever recipient of a cellular call. The disgruntled colleague shouldn’t have been too upset, though. Half a century later, he’s surely carrying an offshoot of that phone in his pocket. And as for 95-year-old Marty Cooper? He’s still trying to make the world a better place
Martin Cooper is the fellow who cut the cord, who unshackled humanity from the limitations of the telephone wire, who bequeathed the world with one of the top ten inventions of the 20th century.
It’s been 50 years since that day in April of 1973, when Marty Cooper, then an engineer at a tenacious technology company called Motorola, and head of its communications division, stood on a Manhattan streetcorner, punched a phone number into a large box with a digit panel that looked like the then-ultra-modern push-button phones, and put it to his ear while passersby wondered what on earth he was doing with that mammoth contraption.
Cooper dialed the number of Joel Engel, his counterpart at Motorola’s rival Bell Laboratories, the research division of AT&T. He couldn’t wait to hear Joel’s expression when he’d pick up.
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