Trustee Martin Cooper was sitting on the stage during last spring’s commencement exercise at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago when he heard a ring from inside his academic gown and felt a buzz in his pocket — an incident proving that even the father of the cell phone is susceptible to a common plague.

“It turns out my phone made a butt call,” Cooper says from his home office in Del Mar, Calif. The other party called back, so he apologized. When asked what was happening, he activated the video camera. “I showed them all these kids walking by and I’m dressed in this ridiculous costume. I mean, how could you possibly have an experience like that 40 years ago?”

No one knows better that it was impossible. Call it what you will — handheld portable wireless telephone, mobile phone, cell phone-leading-to-the-smartphone — Cooper steered the development of this marvelous device, which has transformed lives as it also refashions education, economic activity, leisure time, and social customs.

The 95-year-old inventor finds himself discussing such topics with friends on morning

beach walks along the Pacific Ocean. “The impact of the phone is just barely starting, because now we’re integrating artificial intelligence into this phone,” he says. “We’ve got not only the ability to talk to anybody in the world at any time, but the ability to access all the information in the world.”

Not even Cooper foresaw the integration of the mobile phone with powerful computational hardware and at-your-service software. “When the internet became a part of the mobile telephone, that’s when we knew,” he says, but the thought is interrupted as his phone rings: “Joanne, I’ll call you back in an hour or so.”

The merging of phone and the Web coincides with the canny development of bandwidth management within the electromagnetic spectrum of the broadcast frequencies. (The mobile phone is, after all, a radio transmitter and receiver.)

Years ago, it was believed the bandwidth was limited, and peak over-the-air surcharges were sometimes applied on phone bills. Nowadays, users take for granted having sufficient capacity not only for voice communications, but also for transmitting photos, videos, and data, or streaming games and movies.

How things reached this point is a story of high-tech industrial adventure, a brash move by Motorola Inc. against the monopolistic giant AT&T and its prestigious research-and-development arm, Bell Laboratories, with Cooper — whose fine sense of style shows up in every photo and even in the videoconference — as the leading man.

Cooper joined Motorola’s applied research department in 1954. By that time, he had earned a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, or Illinois Tech, and served in the U.S. Navy. Taking night classes at the school, he would go on to earn an M.S. in electrical engineering and mathematics in 1957.

Founded in Chicago by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin in 1928 as Galvin Manufacturing Corp., the company that would become known as Motorola manufactured, at the time, a “battery eliminator,” adapting battery-powered radio receivers to plug into the wall socket. Sears Roebuck and Co. offered the product in its catalog, but forthcoming technological advances would curtail demand.

Looking for a new product, Paul Galvin put out feelers to Detroit’s automakers. They

suggested a scaled-down AM radio receiver to fit in a car’s dashboard. It should be sturdy enough to maintain reception over a bumpy road.

Michael Galvin, grandson of Paul, recounts his grandfather’s next step. “He went back (to Chicago) and tried to find an engineer that could basically invent and commercialize the first car radio. That was Bill Lear. It put them into the radio business (in 1930), and saved the company because they created a whole new industry.”

The brand name Motorola was chosen, and reflecting the acclaim it earned, Galvin Manufacturing was renamed Motorola Inc. in 1947. Lear went on to establish Lear Developments, specialists in aerospace instruments and electronics, and the creator of the world’s first 8 Track tape player for cars, and later founded Learjet.

“The history of Motorola is creating new industries every 15 years,” says Galvin, a corporate lawyer who serves as chairman of Illinois Tech’s board of trustees. “From there, they evolved and were a new leader in car radios, (but) they had to renew and do new things. They said, ‘We see another world war on the horizon. Maybe we could get that radio on the move to talk to (one another) — not just get one signal.’ ”

The result, in 1940, was the SCR-300, a two-way radio in a backpack. Requiring two soldiers for its operation, it became known as the walkie-talkie. Motorola worked on downscaling the hardware and soon delivered the Handie-Talkie SCR-536 for battlefield use.

Following World War II, Motorola did groundbreaking work in the development of pagers, first used by staff at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. The company also marketed portable two-way radios to the Chicago Police Department, introducing a cellular support system based on the concepts of a Bell Labs researcher.

Meanwhile, in 1946, the year before Bell Labs invented the solid-state transistor, AT&T offered the Mobile Telephone System car phone through the American Bell Telephone Co. Made for Bell by Motorola, it was 80 pounds of vacuum tubes and mechanical parts that went into the car’s trunk.

When the unit’s clunky decoder-selector sequenced the incoming pulses, a notification sounded inside the car. Very High Frequency radio signals linked MTS to the regular telephone network through one of just three available channels, and depended on a switchboard operator to finalize the connection (and listen in).

“This was the mobile phone in its earliest stage and was the first combination of a radio and a telephone to reach the market,” writes Guy Klemens in “The Cellphone: The History and Technology of the Gadget That Changed the World.”

“Too large to be carried in anything less than an automobile and too expensive for any but

the elite, the car phone nonetheless was popular.” The equipment cost $2,000 when a top-of-the-line Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser convertible was $1,840.

The Federal Communications Commission was already apprehensive of an AT&T monopoly and only gave it half the requested allocation of spectrum frequencies; the rest were reserved for independent base-station operators who bought their equipment from Motorola. These carriers would rise to become competitors of AT&T.

By the early 1960s, under Cooper’s engineering leadership, Motorola got the contract from Bell Labs to produce the Improved Mobile Telephone Service, which went on to achieve success for the Chicago company. The car telephone worked like any typical phone. IMTS was still at least 10 times as expensive as a landline in a house, but strong demand kept the system going until the rise of cellular-based mobile service.

An FCC decision in 1968 opened the way for cellular systems. The agency wiped out accommodations for the weakest Ultra High Frequency television channels and made the bandwidth available for wireless phones.

At Motorola in 1956, co-founder Paul Galvin had passed the torch to his son, Bob, when it was a $200-million-a-year company. According to Michael, who is the son of Bob Galvin, the advent of cellular technology was the result of a high-wire act once the FCC opened the way.

“At the time Marty Cooper, with my father’s support, was betting the company, Motorola, on the development of cellular technology — where a call could be passed from one cell to the other, seamlessly, without either side of the call feeling that change,” Michael says.

AT&T was “actually a little bit ahead,” but a business consultant told them the cellular telephone market would never grow beyond $150 million a year. “AT&T decided not to race to the finish line to put this technology out there into the marketplace,” Michael adds.

Yet, AT&T still wanted the bandwidth.

There also was the matter of creating the right kind of phone.

Cooper wanted it to be truly portable. It was late 1972, and new FCC hearings on

bandwidth allocations were scheduled for the following spring. As told in his autobiography, “Cutting the Cord: The Cell Phone Has Transformed Humanity,” Cooper went to Motorola’s design chief, Rudy Krolopp, and said, “Rudy, I need you to design a handheld wireless telephone, a portable cell phone.” Krolopp responded, “What the hell’s a portable cell phone?”

The design team figured it out with uncanny results, producing five definitive prototypes. The next problem was downsizing existing components and inventing new ones. The phone had to be full duplex — no more press-to-talk for “Roger that” and “over and out,” as on a walkie-talkie.

Thanks to a new “tri-selector” internal component, a user could listen and talk at the same time. Additionally, radio-frequency power-amplification was needed for the production of one watt at 900 megahertz.

The receiver itself had to be sensitive enough to pluck the weak UHF signal from the air, and the phone had to be able to use hundreds of channels. New circuitry was designed in support of all the new components.

In its own way, Cooper’s program was like a “moonshot,” but with about 30 to 35 engineers and three months’ time to develop the phone and supporting cellular base-station infrastructure.

“I’ve always been imaginative,” Cooper says from his office. He remembers having a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring as a young tyke. “I would sit there listening to the radio — this was, of course, way before televisions — decoding messages.”

His love for discovery came about when he was 8 years old; the Cooper family lived in Fort William (now Thunder Bay), Ontario. At the time, Cooper went to the library to check out “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” one of Sherlock Holmes’ most famous investigations written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

“I still remember looking up at this librarian, who was sitting behind a counter way above

me, and she said, ‘Are you sure you can read a book like this?’ I did read it, and still have memories of what was in that book.”

Cooper put his inner Sherlock Holmes to work on solving the case of the mobile phone. Naysayers within Motorola questioned the project’s value, and Cooper had to tap the same resourcefulness he had learned from his mother, Mary Cooper, who peddled goods door-to-door with great success.

“It took a lot of selling to keep this project going,” he says. The prototype DynaTAC (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) was soon to become known as The Brick. It was more like the Handie-Talkie squawk box in size (13 inches tall) than any of the models from Motorola’s design department.

Nevertheless, the 2-pound, 10-ounce unit met the primary requirements by accessing nearly 400 radio channels; the 14-volt nickel-cadmium battery was good for a dozen short calls or 30 minutes, would last a few hours on standby, and recharged in 10 hours.

“By the end of March, we actually did some test phone calls, and the phone worked,” Cooper relays.

The next step, on April 3, 1973, was a visit to New York City. Cooper was supposed to be a guest on CBS Morning News but got bumped, so he ended up making the world’s first cell phone call for a local radio reporter. The inventor’s choice of a recipient may be among the great industrial pranks of all time.

The signal went over the air to an antenna atop a 50-story Midtown Manhattan skyscraper and was relayed by a connected base station to a landline network, then routed to rival engineer Joel Engel’s desk at Bell Labs in New Jersey. Engel later professed no recollection of the moment, and even downplayed the DynaTAC’s significance.

Michael Galvin cherishes the memory of his own first cellular connection. “The first Brick telephone call I ever made was to Paul Galvin’s brother and sister, Burley Galvin and Helen Galvin, who lived together in Harvard, Ill., where (they) grew up,” he says. “It was very exciting. My father set me up. It was very easy to use and worked great.” The memory makes him chuckle. “It was really cool.”

After visiting New York, Cooper’s next stop was Washington, D.C., where he demonstrated

DynaTAC to the FCC, proving that 900 MHz was possible for two-way communications. Eventually, a standard part of his pitch was touting the number-for-a-lifetime concept. “We told people that someday, when you were born, you’d be assigned a phone number, and if you didn’t answer the phone (decades later), you had died. We knew it was going to be big, but not many people believed us. It really took about 20 years.”

Along the way, other challenges emerged, with lobby groups influencing FCC approvals as well as the government’s breakup of Ma Bell’s monopoly, resulting in the formation of seven independent, regional “Baby Bell” systems.

Back in Chicago, engineering refinements to the hardware still needed to be made. And acceptance by consumers was hardly a given. Galvin remembers his father being challenged on the size of The Brick, the intrusiveness of the device that made its owner available day and night, and the high cost of airtime. Folks would ask, “Bob, if I can drive up the road and put a dime in a phone booth and make a call, why would I want to pay $5 a minute?”

A breakthrough occurred in 1982 when Bob Galvin brought along his son, Christopher — Michael’s brother and the future CEO of Motorola — on a visit to the White House. The senior Galvin was chatting with his old friend, Vice President George H.W. Bush. Formerly the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, Bush knew Galvin from the latter’s service on an agency advisory committee.

Galvin naturally brought The Brick with him. In Cooper’s written account, Galvin invited Bush to call his wife, Barbara, and the vice president blurted out, “Guess what I’m doing? Talking on a portable telephone.”

Later that day, after a big meeting on trade, Bush invited President Ronald Reagan to have a look. After making a call, Reagan told an aide, “You get ahold of the FCC chairman and tell him I want this thing released.” The DynaTAC 8000X entered the market in 1983 with a price of $3,995.

There still remained the long process of miniaturizing components and perfecting user interfaces for mobile phones, while other manufacturers such as Nokia emerged to provide competition in the marketplace.

In turn, some people were slow to adopt phones because of worries about radio waves causing cancer, although the National Cancer Institute says the human body does not absorb this type of energy.

Finally, in 2007, Apple and the late Steve Jobs released the first iPhone, starting at $499. Other manufacturers followed with their own smartphones, and the old adage about being able to walk and chew gum at the same time became “walk and check phone.” Nanotechnology has resulted in the iPhone 17 Pro’s A17 chip having 19 billion transistors.

Aside from the annoyance of the occasional butt call, Marty Cooper takes inspiration from the quantum acceleration of The Brick, a single- function device, to today’s mobile internet — with the metaverse on tap.

He looks earnestly into his desktop camera and speaks of AI processing information and solving problems for us.

“I think there is the potential — I may be an optimist; in fact, I am one — but we’re going to solve the really big problems. There is no excuse for anybody to be hungry anywhere in the world, no excuse to have warfare.

“There is enough for everybody. We don’t have to fight each other to get it. We should be improving productivity. Everybody in the world has the potential to be wealthy. I believe all those things are going to happen if we don’t blow ourselves up first.”

• 1908: A U.S. patent was issued in Kentucky for a wireless telephone.
• 1917: Finnish inventor Eric Tiger-
  stedt filed a patent for a “pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone.”
• 1926: The first mobile telephony service was offered to first-class passengers on the Deutsche Reichsbahn, journeying between Berlin and Hamburg.
• 1940s: Engineers working at AT&T developed cells for mobile phone base stations.
  1946: The first calls were made on a car radiotelephone in Chicago.
• 1956: The first automated mobile phone system for private vehicles launched in Sweden.
• 1969: The Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) Group was established. It included engineers representing Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, and wanted a mobile phone system that focused on accessibility.
• 1973: The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by Martin Cooper of Motorola in New York City.
• 1979: The first commercial automated cellular network (1G) analog was launched in Japan by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone.
• 1983: The Motorola DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone.
• 1991: The second-generation (2G) digital cellular technology was launched in Finland.
• 1992: The first smartphone was introduced by IBM.
• 1994: The first smartphone was released to the public.
• 1998: The first downloadable content sold to mobile phones was the ringtone, launched by Finland’s Radiolinja.
• 1999: Emojis were invented by Shigetaka Kurita in Japan.
• 1999: The first BlackBerry phone was unveiled.
• 2000: The first commercially available camera phone, the Sharp J-SH04, launched in Japan.
• 2001: The third-generation (3G) was launched in Japan by NTT DoCoMo.
• 2001: Cell phones access the internet.
• 2007: The Apple iPhone debuted.
• 2008: The first Android phone, in the form of the T-Mobile G1, arrived.
• 2009: The first publicly available 4G service was launched in Scandinavia by TeliaSonera.
• 2019: The deployment of fifth-generation (5G)
  cellular networks commenced worldwide.

Sources: Uswitch, Textedly

Walk and Talk

Cell phones didn’t become a must-have item for Americans until the late 1990s, but in the 1960s wireless telecommunications were all over U.S. television.

“Get Smart’s” Agent 86, Maxwell Smart, had a wireless phone embedded in his shoe. The cast of “Star Trek” conversed across galaxies using wireless “communicators.” Batman had a car phone in the iconic Batmobile.

Meanwhile, “The Jetsons,” set in 2062, had smart watches and video conferencing capability. Even earlier, in 1946, Dick Tracy sported a two-way wrist radio, an early smart watch, in comic books.

Although it didn’t take technology until 2062 to catch up with the imaginations of Mel Brooks and Gene Roddenberry, it did take about 30 years for cell phones to become as prevalent as, well, air itself.

Although a U.S. patent was issued in Kentucky for a wireless telephone in 1908, it might come as a surprise that much of the groundbreaking work in cellular communications happened in northern Europe.

In 1917, Finnish inventor Eric Tigerstedt filed a patent for a “pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone.” The first automated mobile phone system for private vehicles was launched in Sweden in 1956. In 1969, engineers representing Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland founded the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) Group to develop a mobile phone system that focused on accessibility.

From there, 2G digital cellular technology was launched in Finland in 1991, while the first downloadable ringtone was launched by Finland’s Radiolinja in 1998. The first publicly available 4G service was started in Scandinavia by TeliaSonera in 2009.

Less surprising is the role Japan played in the cell phone’s development. In 1979, the first commercial automated analog cellular network (1G) was launched in the Land of the Rising Sun by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. Shigetaka Kurita invented emojis in 1999, and in 2001, 3G was launched by NTT DoCoMo. The first commercially available camera phone, the Sharp J-SH04, was released in Japan in 2000.

In the U.S., engineers working at AT&T developed cells for mobile phone base stations, and in 1946 the first calls were made on a car radiotelephone in Chicago. Motorola introduced the first commercially available cell phone in 1983.

Two decades later, “The Brick” phone — which weighed 2.5 pounds and required its own portable battery and carrying case — revolutionized pocket-sized devices; Motorola’s first flip phone in 1996 harkened back to those “Star Trek” communicators.

In 2007, everything changed with the debut of the Apple iPhone. It was the first phone with multi-touch technology and internet access. From there, the technological advancements came fast and furious, and new models were unveiled seemingly every year, with more capabilities and features.

While we may not be talking into our shoes, it appears the creators of 1960s TV were onto something.

— Tim Keenan