Unless you work in the telecoms industry, you are unlikely to have heard of Marty Cooper. He is hardly a household name. But his influence has been felt across the world, because he is the engineer who took the cellular technology used in the carphones of the 1970s and decided that phones ought to be small enough to be portable. His determination led to the first prototype, in 1973, and then to the first commercial mobile phone in 1983. “Marty is the most influential person no one has ever heard of,” says Robert McDowell, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, America’s telecoms regulator.The son of Ukrainian immigrants, Mr Cooper spent much of his youth in Depression-era Chicago. He says he never went hungry, but his parents made only a modest living selling merchandise door-to-door, on instalment plans. To finance his education at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Mr Cooper joined the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, and ended up on a navy destroyer, blowing up railway tracks along the North Korean coast during the Korean war. Mr Cooper later switched to submarines and spent a year and a half stationed in Hawaii. There he picked up scuba diving, one of his many athletic pastimes. He enjoyed the navy very much, but he wanted to settle down, so he took a job at Teletype, a subsidiary of Western Electric. He started working at Motorola in 1954 and had earned his masters in electrical engineering at night school by 1957, again at the Illinois Institute of Technology.To read this report in full in The Economist, see:
www.economist.com/science/tq/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13725793
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