Martin Cooper

There are more

cell phones in the world today than there are toilets, for example.

1983 is when the first systems went on.

The very first systems had a large city like L.A.

or Chicago and maybe a couple of dozen cell sites.

which could serve hundreds of people instead of tens.

But it took until the late 1990s before people could afford these phones, the first cell phones.

Costs were 50 cents a minute for talking, so they were really just much too expensive.

When the smartphone came into being, and I'm talking about real smartphones, when Steve Jobs figured out how to provide a

User interface that made sense and which was only a dozen years ago and they Cell phone we didn't really ludicrous to call it a phone Because it now became a computer that had access to the internet and access to lots of applications And that's only been around for 12 years or so.

It's quite amazing.

Well, the only reason for that was that for years, the cell phones, the handheld cell phones just didn't work very well.

Think about it.

When you're in a car, you're using the car battery, which is huge, has great capacity.

So it's not unreasonable for a car phone to have 20 watts of output.

A cell phone has a fraction of a watt.

So you have to be pretty close to a cell site.

And it really took...

until around 2000 for there to be enough cell sites so the handheld phones were as reliable or more so than car phones.

Only in the last 20 years has that been possible.