Martin Cooper

Think about the potential of a cell phone.

The UN did a study that showed that 1.2 billion people in Africa moved out of severe poverty, mostly because of their cell phones.

Great to be here, Michael.

Well, it depends what you call a real cell phone.

When we created the first cell phone, somebody else, namely the Bell system, you're maybe too young to remember the Bell system.

They were the monopoly that ran all of our telephones before 1983.

And they invented this idea called cellular.

And their idea of what a cell phone was, was a car phone.

Just think about that, that we have been trapped in our homes and our offices by that copper wire for a hundred years.

And now the bell system was coming and telling us that we had the freedom of cell phones, but we're now trapped in our cars.

So we at Motorola just didn't believe that.

I proposed that we have the freedom that comes from being anywhere, which is a handheld telephone, a personal portable telephone.

And that's when we actually built one.

April 3rd, 1973, we actually demonstrated a working handheld portable telephone.

1973.

Right.

Car phones have been around, as you say, since the 1950s.

But those car phones used a radio channel where there was just one

a conversation per radio channel in a city.

You could only have maybe 30 people in the city of Los Angeles talking on a car phone.