It was desperation, not necessity that propelled Marty Cooper, vice president and general manager of Motorola's communications systems division, to initiate the development of the cell phone. Cooper needed to convince the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) not to award a monopoly to AT&T for the new cellular spectrum to be used with car phones at hearings scheduled for May 1973. In November 1972, Cooper ordered the crash development of a handheld portable phone to illustrate how competition could spur innovation and placed Motorola engineer Don Linder in charge. By the following April, two models had been built and Cooper proudly demonstrated them to the media and the FCC.
Cooper was the son of Russian immigrants, born in Chicago the day after Christmas in 1928. After graduating from college, Cooper served as a submarine officer in the Navy for three years, then earned a masters degree from the Illinois Institute of Technology. He joined Motorola in 1954 after a year as a research engineer at Teletype Corp. Cooper started as a senior development engineer in Motorola's mobile equipment group, slowly moving up through the ranks as a senior development engineer, chief engineer, product manager, operations manager, vice president and division manager, and finally corporate director of R&D.
In the years after World War II, Motorola became the leading equipment supplier in the so-called "land-mobile" industry, better known as the car phone business. During the same time, AT&T had been developing cellular. In 1968, the FCC allotted 800 MHz spectrum for this new cellular program. AT&T, which already controlled the nation's landline phone network, petitioned for exclusive control of this new spectrum.
Motorola reacted by developing DynaTAC, a competing 900 MHz cellular system. But Cooper realized that Motorola would need a flashy equipment breakthrough to convince the FCC not to award AT&T another phone monopoly and initiated a crash development program.
The fundamental technologies of a handheld phone were well-known by Cooper and Motorola. But Cooper and Linder's engineering team quickly overcame a plethora of technical challenges. One of these was Cooper commandeering newly developed chip sets destined for another car phone product for use in the two model phones Linder and his group were building.
On Tuesday morning, April 3, 1973, at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan, Cooper and fellow Motorola executive John Mitchell demonstrated the two working phones to the media. While it is debatable how much influence this public demonstration had, a year later the FCC turned down AT&T’s request for exclusivity and awarded multiple licenses in each metropolitan market, and Motorola established itself as the nation's premier wireless handset supplier.
Cooper also formulated the Law of Spectral Efficiency, otherwise known as Cooper's Law, which states 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.
Cooper left Motorola in 1983 but did not retire. Cooper co-founded Cellular Business Systems in 1986 and co-founded Cellular Payphone, the parent company of Jitterbug, a cell phone service and equipment supplier targeted to senior citizens. In 1993, Cooper co-founded cellular antenna company ArrayComm, serving as its CEO through 2002, and is now executive chairman. He also serves on a number of public and private company boards of directors. Last year, Cooper, Don Linder and the cell phone development team were awarded the Great Moments Engineering Award from GlobalSpec.