Cell Culture

LOVE him or hate him, he is the man who freed some one billion people the world over to communicate with one another anytime, anywhere; and in the process irritate the hell out of those seeking a quiet meal in a restaurant or enjoying a movie or a concert.
Unlike Alexander Graham Bell who stumbled upon his invention of the conventional land-line telephone by accident (he spilled acid on his clothes and cried into a transmitter, "Mr Watson, come here!") in 1876, Dr Martin Cooper's 30- year-old invention stemmed from his strong belief that wireless communication should be "attached to a person".
Back in 1973, the only mobile phones were car telephones built into automobiles. The American company AT&T, then the world's largest company, had invented the concept of cellular, but did not believe that a handheld device was necessary.
"I strongly believe that wireless communication should be attached to a person, so it can travel with them, and not tied to a car or other physical location. People are inherently and naturally mobile. So my team and I began work on creating a portable cellular telephone.
"With the creation of the cellular phone, we showed people that they could have the freedom to be anywhere and still remain connected to society," he said.
The first working prototype mobile phone was called the Motorola Dyna-Tac. It looked like a brick, weighed 2lbs, with no display screen, a talk time of 35 minutes and a recharge time of 10 hours. Its only features were dial, talk and listen.
Indeed, it was something of a mammoth compared to today's cellphones that weigh about 3oz or 4oz and can easily fit into users' palms. And last year alone, a total of 423 million handsets were sold to consumers.
For as long as he can remember, 74-year-old Cooper said he knew he was going to become an engineer or a technologist. As a child, he wanted to know how everything worked.
"I still have recollections of imagining a train operating by magnetic levitation in an airless tunnel when I was eight years old. It was very natural that I went to a technical high school where I took every shop available, from woodworking to foundry, including chemistry and physics. I always knew that I would go to an engineering college, and of course I did," he said.
Cooper grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and earned a degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. After four years in the navy serving on destroyers and a submarine, he worked for a year with a telecommunications company.
Hired by Motorola in 1954, Cooper worked on developing portable products, including the first portable handheld police radios, made for the Chicago police department in 1967. He then led Motorola's cellular research programme.
While he was a project manager at Motorola in 1973, Cooper set up a base station on the roof of the Burlington Consolidated Tower (now the Alliance Capital Building) in New York with the Motorola Dyna-Tac.
On April 3 that year, standing on a street near the Manhattan Hilton, Cooper decided to attempt a private call before going to a press conference at the hotel. He picked up the chunky Dyna-Tac and pressed the "off hook" button. The phone came alive, connecting him with the base station and into the land-line system. He dialled a number and held the phone to his ear.
And whom did he call?
The first call he made was to his rival, Joel Engel, Bell Labs' head of research.
Did he ever imagine that his invention of the first portable handset would turn into such a booming business?
"The impact of cellular telephones was in one sense a surprise and in another sense predicted. There was no question in our minds when we created the cellular that everyone would ultimately use cellular phones for their personal calls.
"However, at the time that the commercial cellular service started, a portable cellular phone cost US$3,500 in 1983, which is equivalent to about twice that today. It was hard to imagine the huge market we have today at those kinds of prices.
"The surprise is that in a mere 19 years the price of a cellular phone has gone from the equivalent of about US$7,000 to a situation today where people give cellular phones away for nothing in order to acquire a subscriber."
And Cooper does not believe that there is such a thing as a "universal device" that does all things for all people.
"Just as there are many types of people - teenagers, business people, seniors - there will be many types of phones with characteristics that are perfectly suited to them.
"Likewise, there will be varying types of voice and data services to meet their needs, with many different prices and features to help people communicate the way they want to," he said.
Cooper left Motorola in 1983, the year the first cellular systems became commercially available. After starting, then selling a company that managed billing for cellular companies, Cooper worked as an independent consultant until he established his current venture, ArrayComm, in 1992.
When he co-founded ArrayComm, he was motivated by the unfulfilled promise of cellular. "It has not replaced the land-line phones as we expected, because wireless access is still not as reliable or affordable as a wired telephone."
ArrayComm's core technology increases the capacity and coverage of any cellular system while significantly lowering costs and making communication more reliable. This technology is what is needed to fulfill the dream of the cellular industry."
Five years ago, the company conceived of using its "smart antenna" technology to make the Internet personal and portable. That concept has become the i-BURST Personal Broadband System, which delivers affordable high-speed, mobile Internet access.
"It's very exciting to be part of this movement towards delivering the Internet wherever you want to use it, just as I helped deliver that mobility to voice communication," he said.
He said wireless voice service still frustrates many consumers because of dropped calls, poor coverage and expensive fees.
"The technology exists to solve those problems, and as the wireless industry matures it will adopt technology to give customers a completely reliable and affordable communication experience. In addition, people now rely on the Internet for a large part of their business and personal communication, and existing cellular networks are not designed for effective Internet delivery. So mobile wireless broadband, with systems designed specifically for Internet access, whether with a computer or some other Web-enabled device, will be the next wave of major innovation," he added.
His ArrayComm is currently addressing both the existing cellular problems and the new wireless Internet opportunity.
And at 74, Cooper is still very much running the business. Will there come a time when he will retire? "Retirement is being able to do exactly what you want to do every day, and I'm already doing that!"
Neither of his children have followed in his footsteps as an inventor or a technologist. One is an attorney and the other an accountant.
"The difficult part of inventing is to understand the problem, the opportunity, that the invention attacks. We literally lived the business - 24 hours a day - and that takes a toll on family. But my family was always very supportive. I have high hopes that one of my four grandchildren will follow in my footsteps."