- CHICAGO (Reuters) - Thirty
years after the first cellular phone call, inventor Martin Cooper still
dreams about the day when futuristic telephone technology is a reality
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- Cooper's dream telephone is so small that it fits behind
his ear, automatically dials out when he thinks about calling someone and
it notifies him of incoming calls with a tickle instead of a ring.
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- The 74-year-old Cooper has yet to see that vision become
a reality, but in the three decades since he invented cell phones, more
than half of Americans have come to own them. Their size has shrunk so
much that they fit into users' palms. At about 4 ounces (114 grams), a
cell phone weighs little more than a lemon.
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- That's a far cry from the 30-ounce (850-gram) phone Cooper
used when he made the first portable phone call on April 3, 1973 -- 30
years ago. The phone was 10 inches (25 cm) in height, 3 inches (8 cm) deep
and an inch-and-a-half (4 cm) wide.
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- "Our basic dream was that people didn't want to
talk to cars. They didn't want to talk to a desk or a wall (where phones
were generally placed). They want to talk to other people," said Cooper,
who was general manager for the systems division at Motorola Inc. MOT.N
at the time.
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- INVENTION OF THE 'SHOE PHONE'
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- Cooper's invention would be considered a clunker by today's
standards, but back then it was revolutionary.
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- The closest "portable" phone was a car phone
that weighed more than 30 pounds (13.5 kg) and cost thousands of dollars.
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- An owner had to drill a hole in his car to install the
antenna and most of the phone sat in the trunk. A control unit with a handset
was placed inside the car.
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- Robert Galvin, chairman emeritus and then-chief executive
of Motorola, remembers his father and Motorola founder Paul Galvin driving
around with a car phone in his late years.
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- "As of the 1950s, I certainly was of the mind that
some day something about telephones in cars or elsewhere ought to be a
big business," Galvin told Reuters in a telephone interview.
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- Under Galvin's support, Motorola invested $15 million
a year for 10 years in research and development -- but the first cell phone
was designed in just three days and built in six to eight weeks.
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- Dubbed the "shoe phone" for its design, it
was rushed to dissuade regulatory authorities from giving telecommunications
giant AT&T Corp. T.N complete control over cellular communications
in the United States. AT&T was betting its future on car telephones
as opposed to Motorola's vision of portable telephones.
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- Rudy Krolopp, who was Motorola's chief designer, recalls
the meeting when the engineers were informed of the deadline.
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- "I ripped the cloth off the top of the model and
everybody's jaw dropped down," he said. "Then Marty said, 'Anybody
who doesn't believe that this project can be done in time, leave the room.'
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- "With the kind of egos we had, nobody left the room."
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- KID INVENTOR
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- Raised in Chicago, Cooper received a degree in electrical
engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
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- "I'd been taking things apart and inventing things
since I was a little kid ... I still have memories as a child trying to
really understand how things work," he said.
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- One of his earliest inventions was a concept for a high-speed
transcontinental train that ran in a vacuum tunnel and was suspended by
magnetic forces -- he was 8 or 9 years old.
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- Still, Cooper didn't turn to engineering until his hopes
as a physicist were dashed by his struggles with college chemistry experiments.
"I couldn't even boil water," he joked.
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- Cooper was hired by Motorola in 1954 after four years
with the U.S. Navy as a submarine officer and a year at a telecommunications
company. He stayed at Motorola for nearly 30 years, overseeing the commercialization
of the first cell phone.
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- THE NEXT FRONTIER
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- Cooper said he has been pleasantly surprised at how fast
consumers adopted the cell phone although he is disappointed that cell
phone coverage is still not ubiquitous.
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- According to research firm Gartner Dataquest, 423 million
handsets were sold to consumers in 2002 and some 1 billion people around
the world now use cell phones. European countries enjoy cell phone adoption
rates as high as 80 percent, and emerging markets in China and India are
growing rapidly.
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- Motorola recorded revenue of $3.3 billion from its cell
phone unit in the fourth quarter of 2002, not bad for a business that Robert
Galvin once predicted "will someday represent something over $100
million."
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- The company is the world's second-largest mobile phone
maker.
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- Cooper believes the next big advancement in the wireless
industry will be ubiquitous, wide-area, high-speed access to the Internet.
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- To that end, he is currently serving as chairman and
chief executive of privately held San Jose, California-based ArrayComm,
which developed a technology that does just that.
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