The man who invented the first cell phone said people should “live” and stop using their devices so much.
Engineer Martin Cooper, 93, is credited with creating the original wireless cellular device – the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X – in 1973, but now, almost 50 years later, he thinks people should spend less time on their phones .
While speaking to BBC Breakfast recently, the inventor and engineer, who is from Chicago, admitted that he uses his mobile phone less than “five per cent” of the time.
And when asked what he had to say to people who use their hours every day, he said they should put their phones down and live a little.
“What would you say to anyone like me who uses it for more than five hours?” host Jane McCubbin asked him during the new interview.
The man who invented the first ever mobile phone said people should ‘live’ and stop using it so much
Martin Cooper, 93, is credited with creating the original wireless cellular device – the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X – in 1973, but now he thinks people should spend less time on their phones
Speaking to BBC Breakfast recently, the inventor and engineer, who is from Chicago, admitted he uses his mobile less than “five per cent” of the time
‘You really? Do you really spend five hours a day? he replied before adding with a laugh, “Get a life.”
Martin graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1950 and earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering from IIT seven years later.
His first job was at Teletype Corporation before moving to Motorola in 1954. In his early years at the company, he helped pioneer many products such as one of the first handheld police radio systems.
In the 1970s, car phones – which plugged into vehicle batteries and made outgoing calls over radio channels but almost never worked – became more popular, but Martin was the first person to bring a portable phone to market .
‘[Car phones] there was one transmitter in a city and a very limited amount of radio channels,” he previously told CBS News.
“The odds were one in 20 that you could get on the phone, that’s how bad the service was.”
Martin said at the exit that car phones were simply “wrong”, adding: “People have been connected to their desks and kitchens for over 100 years, and now they’re going to connect us to our cars, where we spend five per cent of our time.’
Before creating a way to make it work, he thought about how he wanted it to look.
“Small enough to fit in your pocket, big enough to fit between your ears and your mouth,” he explained.
And when asked what he had to say to people who use their watches for hours a day, he said they should put their phones down and live a little
The original phone could last 25 minutes before running out of battery, and it took 10 hours to charge. It weighed two and a half pounds and was 10 inches long
Martin came up with the idea of assigning each person their own phone number and helped create the concept of wireless communication using cell phone towers
He then came up with the idea of assigning each person a telephone number — “not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home, but to a person,” he once said, according to American History.si.edu.
He pioneered the concept of wireless communication, using his experience in the radio industry to create a system of towers from which the telephone could ping.
He spent just three months building the phone with a team of other Motorola employees, with the company reportedly investing $100 million in the product.
On April 3, 1973, Martin made the first ever cell phone call while pitching the product to a reporter. He called his competitor, Joel Engel, who was one of the chief engineers at AT&T.
“I said, ‘Joel, I’m calling you on a cell phone, but a real cell phone—a personal, hand-held portable cell phone.'” Silence on the other end of the line, he recalled.
The original phone could last 25 minutes before running out of battery, and it took 10 hours to charge. It weighed two and a half pounds and was 10 inches long.
He worked with Motorola for 29 years, rising to vice president and corporate director of research and development.
During his time there, he was also involved in the creation of some of the first pagers and wristwatches.
He married a woman named Arlene Harris, also an inventor, in 1991. After leaving Motorola, he and Arlene started their own mobile phone company together.
He’s now retired, but released his own memoir, called Cutting the Cord, in 2021. And he revealed to CBS last year that there had already been talk of turning it into a movie.
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