40 years since first public mobile phone call
Forty years ago today a visionary American inventor made the first public phone call on a handheld mobile phone. The original handset weighed more than a kilogram and people called it the brick.
Source: The World Today | Duration: 4min 31sec
ELEANOR HALL: Forty years ago a visionary inventor made the first public call on a handheld mobile phone.
Now 84-year-old American, Marty Cooper, has been honoured with an international communications award, and he's still looking to make improvements to his invention as Brendan Trembath reports from the ABC's North America bureau.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Four decades ago Marty Cooper demonstrated an extraordinary device.
MARTY COOPER: Well, I was on the streets of New York with a journalist like yourself and trying to figure out how to give him the most impressive demonstration because what we were looking for is to get lots of publicity so that we could stand up to, we meaning Motorola, this little company in Chicago, we could stand up to AT&T, the biggest company in the world.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: That company had invented the concept of mobile phones, but with cars in mind. Marty Cooper went after a bigger market and called his counterpart at AT&T to brag about it.
MARTY COOPER: And I said, "Joel I'm calling you from a cell phone but a real cell phone, a personal handheld portable cell phone" and there was silence at the other end of the line and to this day Joel doesn't remember that call and I'm not sure I blame him.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: It was 1973, a long time ago, do you remember what you were wearing?
MARTY COOPER: Nobody's ever asked me that before. It happens that we have some films that were made at a press conference that was done just afterwards and I was wearing the ugliest suit that you could imagine. It had a big wide stripes on it. I just couldn't imagine that I would wear anything that was so tasteless but I guess that was the style at that time.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: The first handheld mobile phone was big and bold too.
MARTY COOPER: And it had a battery life of 20 minutes but of course that was not a problem because you couldn't hold that heavy a phone up for longer than 20 minutes anyway. It was just huge by today's standards.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Today Marty Cooper can't live without a mobile phone, and he's not alone. He still sees room for improvement.
MARTY COOPER: I think we've got get the cost of the service down, the cost of the devices down and make these things much easier to use. I think they are much too cumbersome now and they're trying to turn us all into engineers like I am and that's not right.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: He says reducing prices would make a world of difference.
MARTY COOPER: People who are poor, who are disadvantaged, really don't have the ability to use data and smartphones and if you think of all the benefits that come out of that, that's a shame.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Marty Cooper had an interest in technology since childhood. He was one of those kids who wanted to know how things worked and would take everything apart from alarm clocks to appliances.
MARTY COOPER: As a matter I'm in the process of with fixing the ice-maker in my refrigerator at the moment so I haven't changed much at all in the last 80 years or so. I still love to look at the insides of things.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: His first job was at Teletype Corporation, which made machines to transmit sports results and other breaking news.
MARTY COOPER: This was a mechanical, I would call it a monstrosity. At that time it was a mechanical marvel that would type information from an electronic signal but it was totally mechanical.
It had motors and wheels and sprockets and gears and it just made this huge racket but it did in fact type at a very slow rate lettered information and this company was a very substantial company but a very good example about how things become obsolete because this multibillion dollar company, 10 years later no longer existed.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Marty Cooper joined Motorola in 1954 at a time when the company was moving into new wireless technology for people on the move.
MARTY COOPER: We actually built a system for the city of Chicago where policemen could carry their radios on their bodies as you know they do today and still communicate throughout the city. These were really the first cellular-like systems.
BRENDAN TREMBATH: Marty Cooper is 84 years old now and proud of his contributions to communications. He's the recipient of this year's Marconi Prize, named after the inventor of radio.
There's an awards dinner in Italy in October.
This is Brendan Trembath for The World Today.
ELEANOR HALL: And you can hear more from Marty Cooper, who invented the mobile phone all those decades ago on our website at www.abc.net.au/worldtoday