Quote of the day by Motorola's cell phone pioneer Martin Cooper: 'People want to talk to other people not a house, or an office, or a car' blueprinting the start of a new era of communications

Date:
Sat, 12 Sep 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Description:
The concept of the mobile phone was a radical departure from the copper-based communications system

FULL STORY ======================================================================Copy link Facebook X Whatsapp Reddit Pinterest Flipboard Threads Email Share this article 0 Join the conversation Follow us Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter The American engineer Mark Cooper is considered one of the leading pioneers of the wireless communications industry, envisioning a world in which people would
communicate wherever they were and not from fixed locations. Without his work in the mid-20th century, the mobile communications industry would arguably be non-existent. "People want to talk to other people not a house, or an
office, or a car. Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire. It is that freedom we sought to vividly demonstrate in 1973." Martin Cooper, April 2011 Hello Moto On the 38th anniversary of the first cell phone call, journalist Bob Greene wrote an article for CNN commemorating Cooper's pioneering work. During this interview, he recounted the way that Cooper explained the thinking behind the concept of the mobile phone. Quote of the day This article is part of TechRadar Pro's QOTD project to provide an
insight into the minds of the brightest and most recognized figures in the technology industry today and in years gone by. Read the full series here . The concept for the "personal telephone", as Cooper described it, came from shifting the concept of a telephone number from something that was fixed to a location or infrastructure to something that represented an individual.
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This notion, which broke away from the absolute necessity of being tethered
to a copper wire, gave individuals (initially working professionals) absolute mobility and freedom to communicate from wherever they were. Call me maybe Cooper headed Motorola's communications systems division in the 1970s and conceived of the first portable cellular phone in 1973, which began a 10-year process of bringing the device to market. You may like 'It's Stalin's dream' Quote of the day by software pioneer Richard Stallman on the tracking capabilities of cell phones The smartphone turns 30 remembering the classic Nokia 9000 Communicator Quote of the day by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: 'There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share' a staggering misread of the future of consumer devices

He was the lead inventor named on the 'radio telephone system' patent filed
in October 1973, but several months earlier he had demonstrated to the press the first handheld cellular phone call in public. He used a prototype DynaTAC device, which he used to call a base station that had been installed on the rooftop of the then-Burlington House in New York.

It's now impossible to envisage how the business world could have been shaped without his pioneering work, with hundreds of millions of units shipping each year. Indeed, this capability to communicate from anywhere and anytime has led to immeasurable productivity benefits over the last few decades. Are you
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