Martin Cooper

Martin Cooper is an American inventor and electrical engineer, born on December 26, 1928, who is widely regarded as the father of the handheld cellular telephone. He built his career in wireless communications and in the management of the radio spectrum, and holds eleven patents in that field. On April 3, 1973, while working at Motorola, he placed the first public call from a prototype handheld portable phone, standing on a Manhattan sidewalk and calling his counterpart at rival Bell Labs. The call was possible because Motorola had built an experimental low power cellular base station on the roof of Burlington House and wired it to the AT&T landline network. Over the following decade Cooper lobbied the Federal Communications Commission and led the team that turned the prototype into a product, which reached the market in 1983 when the first cellular network in the United States opened to the public. He later co-founded several communications companies with his wife and business partner Arlene Harris, serves as co-founder and chairman of Dyna LLC in Del Mar, California, and has sat on committees supporting the FCC and the Department of Commerce. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2010 and received the 2015 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award for his work on the cellular portable telephone.