The Man Who Placed the First Mobile Call 50 Years Ago Talks Phones of the Future

pcmag.com:

Fifty years ago today, Martin Cooper, who then headed Motorola's Portable Products division, stood on Sixth Avenue outside the New York Hilton, demonstrating the first cell phone for the first time in public, calling a competitor at AT&T prior to a press conference.

I recently had an opportunity to talk to Cooper about what led to that call, the creation of the modern cell phone, and where he sees phones going into the future.

We talked about how car phones had been around for years before then, although they were much bigger and much less capable. Cooper recalls how from 1950 to 1983, there were only about 50 radio channels available for car phones, so in cities like Chicago or Los Angeles you could only have a few hundred subscribers. During busy times, you often could not get a channel.

He notes that the concept of cellular telephones uses smaller cells that repeat the use of a spectrum within a city. The idea goes back to a Bell Labs memo from 1947, and he said that in 1969, AT&T went to the FCC and broached the idea of using cellular with a lot more channels, but only if it got a monopoly. It believed this was going to be a small market and wanted to use the concept for things like car phones. Motorola objected to both things, he says, believing it was going to be a bigger market and rather different. "We thought that was ridiculous because I was ready to have a handheld phone that was an extension of the person."

Cooper, who started working for Motorola in 1954, was running the Portable Products group in 1972 when the company decided to make a test device.

At that time, Motorola was the leader in two-way radio communications, and the portable products division was focused on personal communications. While there,