Martin Cooper

Martin Cooper (born December 26, 1928) is an American engineer. He is a pioneer in the wireless communications industry, especially in radio spectrum management, with eleven patents in the field.

On April 3, 1973, Cooper placed the first public call from a handheld portable cell phone while working at Motorola, from a Manhattan sidewalk to his counterpart at competitor Bell Labs. Cooper reprised the first handheld cellular mobile phone (distinct from the car phone) in 1973 and led the team that redeveloped it and brought it to market in 1983. He is considered the "father of the (handheld) cell phone", and received the 2015 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award for this work.

Cooper is co-founder of numerous communications companies with his wife and business partner Arlene Harris; He is co-founder and current Chairman of Dyna LLC, in Del Mar, California. Cooper also sits on committees supporting the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and the United States Department of Commerce.

In 2010, Cooper was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for leadership in the creation and deployment of the cellular portable hand-held telephone.

Education

Cooper was born in Chicago to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. He graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1950 and served as a submarine officer during the Korean War.

By the early 1970s, Cooper headed Motorola's communications systems division. He believed the cellular phone should be a "personal telephone – something that would represent an individual so you could assign a number; not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home, but to a person." Cooper assembled a team that designed and assembled a product in less than 90 days. That original handset, called the DynaTAC 8000x (DYNamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) weighed 2.5 pounds (1.1 kg), measured 10 inches (25 cm) long and was dubbed "the brick" or "the shoe" phone. A very substantial part of the DynaTAC was the battery, which weighed four to five times more than a modern cell phone. John Francis Mitchell, Motorola's Chief of Portable Communication Products (and Cooper's Manager and Mentor) and the engineers who worked for Cooper and Mitchell are also named on the patent.

On April 3, 1973, Cooper and Mitchell demonstrated two working phones to the media and to passers-by prior to walking into a scheduled press conference at the New York City Hilton in midtown Manhattan. Standing on Sixth avenue near the Hilton, Cooper made the first handheld cellular phone call in public from the prototype DynaTAC. The call connected him to a base station Motorola had installed on the roof of the Burlington House (now the AllianceBernstein Building) and into the AT&T land-line telephone system. "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone." That public demonstration landed the DynaTAC on the July 1973 cover of Popular Science Magazine. GreatCall is the first complete end-to-end value-added service provider in the cellular industry to focus on simplicity with its primary emphasis on senior citizens.

Arraycomm

In 1992 Cooper co-founded Arraycomm, a developer of software for mobile antenna technologies. Under his leadership, the Company grew from a seed-funded startup in San Jose, California, into the world leader in smart antenna technology with 400 patents issued or pending, worldwide.

Energous.com

Cooper joined the board of directors from 2015 to 2019.

Cooper's law

Cooper found that the ability to transmit different radio communications simultaneously and in the same place has grown at the same pace since Guglielmo Marconi's first transmissions in 1895. This led Cooper to formulate the Law of Spectral Efficiency, otherwise known as Cooper's Law. The law states that the maximum number of voice conversations or equivalent data transactions that can be conducted in all of the useful radio spectrum over a given area doubles every 30 months.

Awards and affiliations

Mensa 1984 – IEEE Centennial Medal and Fellow 1995 – Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award 1996 – Radio Club of America Fred Link Award and Life Fellow with the International Engineering Consortium 2000 – "Red Herring" Magazine Top Ten Entrepreneurs of 2000 2000 – RCR Wireless News Wireless Hall of Fame Inaugural Member 2002 – American Computer Museum George Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Award 2002 – Wireless Systems Design Industry Leader Award 2006 – CITA Emerging Technologies Award 2007 – Wireless World Research Forum Fellow 2007 – Global Spec Great Moments Engineering Award 2008 – CE Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame Award October 2008 – Top U.S. Wireless Innovators of All Time. 2009 – Prince of Asturias Award for scientific and technical research. 2009 – Life Trustee, Illinois Institute of Technology 2010 – Radio Club of America, Lifetime Achievement Award October 2010 – Member, National Academy of Engineering 2011 – Inaugural Mikhail Gorbachev: The Man Who Changed the World Awards Nominee 2011 – Webby Award for Lifetime Achievement 2012 – Washington Society of Engineers, Washington Award 2013 – Charles Stark Draper Prize, National Academy of Engineering 2013 – Marconi Prize 2013 – Honorary doctorate awarded by the students and the rector of Hasselt University on the occasion of the university's 40th anniversary. 2014 IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu Eminent Member 2019 – Leaves the Energous board of directors. 2025 - Recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Marconi Society Lifetime Achievement Award.