马丁·库帕

Martin Cooper (born December 26, 1928) is an American inventor and electrical engineer. He is a pioneer in the wireless communications industry, especially in radio spectrum management, with 11 patents in the field. He is considered the "father of the (handheld) cell phone".

On April 3, 1973, Cooper placed the first public call from a prototype handheld portable phone (distinct from the car phone) while working at Motorola, from a Manhattan sidewalk to his counterpart at competitor Bell Labs. This was made possible by an experimental radio base station built to transmit on the low-power localized cellular spectrum, as opposed to traditional mobile radio telephones. Motorola built the station on the roof of Burlington House and hardwired it to the AT&T landline telephone network. For the next decade, Cooper lobbied the FCC and reprised the first handheld cellular mobile phone, leading the team that redeveloped it and brought it to market in 1983 when the first cellular network in the United States was launched to the public.

Cooper is co-founder of numerous communications companies with his wife and business partner Arlene Harris; He is co-founder and current Chairman of Dyna LLC, in Del Mar, California. Cooper also sits on committees supporting the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and the United States Department of Commerce. In 2010, Cooper was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering for leadership in the creation and deployment of the cellular portable hand-held telephone. He received the 2015 IEEE Masaru Ibuka Consumer Electronics Award for this work.

Education

Cooper was born in Chicago to Ukrainian Jewish immigrants. He graduated from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1950 and served as a submarine officer during the Korean War.

In 1957, Cooper earned his master's degree from IIT in electrical engineering. In 2004, he received an honorary doctorate degree from IIT. He serves on the university's board of trustees.

Career

Motorola

Cooper left his first job at Teletype Corporation in Chicago in 1954 and joined Motorola, Inc. (Schaumburg, Illinois) as a senior development engineer in the mobile equipment group. He developed products including the first cellular-like portable handheld police radio system, produced for the Chicago police department in 1967.

By the early 1970s, Cooper headed Motorola's communications systems division.……

Cooper's law

Cooper found that the ability to transmit different radio communications simultaneously and in the same place has grown at the same pace since Guglielmo Marconi's first transmissions in 1895. This led Cooper to formulate the Law of Spectral Efficiency, otherwise known as Cooper's Law. The law states that 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.

Publications

Latest publications

"The Myth of Spectrum Scarcity" Position Paper, March 2010.

"Mobile WiMax – Fourth-Generation Wireless," Bechtel Communications Technical Journal, September 2007.

"The Need for Simplicity," in the anthology "Mobile Persuasion: 20 Perspectives on the Future of Behavior Change," published by Stanford University in 2007.

"Personal Communications in 2025" for Eta Kappa Nu Electrical and Computer Engineering Honor Society, Autumn 2005.

"Antennas Get Smart" in Scientific American, July 2003.

Awards and affiliations

• Mensa
• 1984 – IEEE Centennial Medal and Fellow
• 1995 – Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award

1996 – Radio Club of America Fred Link Award and Life Fellow with the International Engineering Consortium

2000 – "Red Herring" Magazine Top Ten Entrepreneurs of 2000

2000 – RCR Wireless News Wireless Hall of Fame Inaugural Member

2002 – American Computer Museum George Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Award

• 2002 – Wireless Systems Design Industry Leader Award
• 2006 – CITA Emerging Technologies Award