April 3, 1973: President Richard Nixon has recently pulled the last American troops out of Vietnam. Schoolhouse Rock delights and educates latchkey kids everywhere, while “Smoke on the Water” tests the limits of quadraphonic sound systems in Chevy vans across the nation. And in New York, Martin Cooper makes the first cellphone call, ever.
Cooper, researcher for Motorola at the time, placed the call from outside the Manhattan Hilton at 56th and Lexington. The recipient was a sullen Joel Engel, a rival researcher who had been involved in promoting the now-outdated car phone for Bell Laboratories. Because Cooper essentially had the entire spectrum to himself, he claims the call came in crystal clear — enough to hear Engel’s teeth gnashing.
New Yorkers, normally renowned for their aloofness in the face of unusual conduct, stopped to gape at Cooper’s remarkable contraption: a brick-like portable telephone, nine inches long and weighing in at 2.5 lb.
It took 10 years before it was ready to hit the market. In 1983, Motorola introduced the 16-ounce DynaTAC phone, a $3,500 phone strictly for the most prestigious yuppies and the most ambitious gangsters. By 1990, there were one million subscribers in the United States alone — few enough to make it less a novelty than status symbol.
Today, of course, a New Yorker walking around without a “celly” will probably be subject to suspicious glances. There are now officially more mobile phone users than wireline subscribers. Modern cellphones weigh as little as three ounces, and still manage to pack in quasi-useful features like integrated cameras and cute polyphonic ringtones. Incidents of brain cancer are similarly on the rise, up about 25 per cent since 1973.
Cooper, now 74, is the CEO of ArrayComm, a San Jose wireless outfit. His company produces software to help cellphone carriers accommodate more calls on a network, an initiative Cooper believes is far more urgent than other new features like text messaging. There are far too many people crammed onto a limited number of channels, which he says results in annoying dropped calls.
Thirty years later, Cooper’s vision of universal communication is not quite fulfilled. He dreams of a tiny device that fits behind the ear, tickles instead of rings, and dials automatically via telepathic communication.
Until then, Cooper has confidence in what he calls the “next generation” of wireless: smart antenna technology. Properly implemented, it could multiply the capacity of spectrum systems several times over.
