Martin Cooper

These were pressed to talk.

Namely, you had to push a button when you wanted to talk and let go of the button when you wanted to hear somebody else.

So it was a really basic service.

And because the people that provided that service

put too many people on their channels, the ability to even use a phone was minimal.

During the busy hour, the chances of getting a channel were almost zero.

So the whole concept of cellular was to make enough channels available so that you could actually make a phone call when you wanted to.

Yeah, they were.

Even the battery, the battery was three or four times bigger than a modern telephone, the battery alone.

They used nickel-cadmium batteries.

You know that today we use lithium-ion batteries.

You just don't realize what primitive times there were.

In 1973, there were no personal computers.

There were no large-scale integrated circuits, no digital cameras.

So if we were working with minimal tools, it took a long time before we had the technology

where we could make the phone small enough, where there were enough cell sites so that when you wanted to talk, you were close enough to a cell site to make it work.

Cell phones didn't really take off until almost 2000, 20 years ago.

And that's when we got to the point where almost everybody was at least aware of cell phones.

As you know today, there are more cell phones in the world, more cell phones in the United States than there are people.

Most of the people in the world have cell phones.