The Cell Phone: Marty Cooper's Big Idea

(CBS)  Editor's note: Though Martin Cooper and his team at Motorola built and demonstrated the first cell phone, there were many fathers of the technology involved in transmitting calls. Prominent among them: Amos Joel, Jr. of AT&T/Bell Labs, who created the system that switches signals from one cell tower to another - the basic component that lets callers talk while moving. Mr. Joel was inducted in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2008 for his development of the switching concept for cellular phones.

There are seven billion people on the planet, and nearly five billion cell phones - meaning most of the Earth's population is connected for sound, for picture, and for heaven only knows what else.

The cell phone has brought us a world without end of talking, twittering, texting, even of sexting. If you don't know what that is, ask any high school kid.

It is all a result of Marty Cooper's big idea. And he looks at it all with pride, amusement and some dismay. And with good reason: he is the father of the cell phone. He built the first one 37 years ago. It ushered in a technological and social revolution which he believes is far from over. He made the first public cell phone call on the sidewalks of New York, in 1973.

Full Segment: Marty Cooper's Big Idea
Web Extra: The First Cell Phone Call
Web Extra: Cheaper Cell Phone Service
Web Extra: Evolution of the Cell Phone
Web Extra: No More Dropped Calls
DYNA

"This is a time when there were no cordless phones. And certainly no cell phones. And here's this guy talking as he was walking along. And I stepped into the street and nearly got creamed by a New York taxicab. So talk about being prescient and seeing a picture of the future," Cooper told "60 Minutes" correspondent Morley Safer.

It's a future - of non-stop connection of apps galore, iPhones and Droids, Blackberrys and Blueteeth - or is it Bluetooths?

Marty Cooper checks out the latest at the wireless industry's annual convention in Las Vegas, a huge convergence where geeks meet gizmos.

And unlike some of us of a certain age, he understands all of it.

Asked if he twitters, Cooper said, "I signed up for Twitter about six months ago, did nothing and I had 17 followers. So now I'm actually twittering. My latest twitter is, 'The secret of successful aging is to have good genes and to show a lot of respect for the genes.'"

Asked if he thinks he's the oldest twitterer in America, Cooper said, "I don't want to be the oldest anything in America. Sorry about that."

But you'll have to look hard to find anyone older on the slopes at Vail, his favorite getaway. Cooper was born in Chicago on the eve of the Great Depression. He's 81, an age, for many, when the most strenuous exercise of the day is getting in and out of bed.

"His tennis and his skiing are better than they've ever been. I have a hard time keeping up with him. And I'm almost 20 years younger," his wife Arlene Harris told Safer.

With his wife, another veteran of the mobile phone business, Cooper is still in the game, awaiting the next big thing in wireless communication. He's convinced that the cell phone, at 37, is still in its infancy.

"Technology has to be invisible. Transparent. Just simple. A modern cell phone in general has an instruction book that's bigger and heavier than the cell phone. That's not right," Cooper said.

Call it the complexity or confusion factor.

Cooper argues that cell phones designed to do everything - take pictures, play music and videos, surf the Web - don't do any of them really well. He thinks the buyers should be dictating exactly what they want.

"The consumer is king. The consumer ought to make the decisions. And not, certainly not the engineer," Cooper said. "Engineers tend to get enchanted by the technology itself."

So it seems only natural that the latest gadget developed by Cooper and his wife is a retro cell phone called the "Jitterbug." It's a basic phone - there's no camera, no music. Any idiot can operate it.

It sounds simple enough: if you can hear a dial tone on the Jitterbug, you can make a call. "If there's no dial tone you can't," Cooper explained.

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[marleyscuts]

Henry Sampson (inventor)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the American inventor. For the English newspaper proprietor and editor, see Henry Sampson (newspaper proprietor)
Henry Thomas Sampson, Jr. (born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1934) is an American inventor.

He graduated from high school in 1951 from Lanier High School in Jackson, Mississippi. He then attended Morehouse College for a couple of years before transferring to Purdue University. He received a Bachelor's degree in science from Purdue University in 1956. He graduated with an MS degree in engineering from the University of California in 1961. Sampson also received his MS in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1965, and his PhD in 1967.

He is the first African American to earn a Ph.D.in Nuclear Engineering in the United States. Some of his accomplishments include being a member of the United States Navy between the years 1962 and 1964 and earning an Atomic Energy Commission honor between 1964 and 1967. Later he was awarded the Black Image Award from Aerospace Corporation in 1982. He was awarded the Blacks in Engineering, Applied Science Award, and prize for education, by the Los Angeles Council of Black Professional Engineers in 1983. In June 2007, Sampson was married to Laura Howzell Young in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. Young-Sampson is a professor in the College of Education at California State University San Bernardino.
Inventor

Sampson was employed as a research chemical engineer at the U.S. Naval Weapons Center, China Lake, California, in the area of high energy solid propellants and case bonding materials for solid rocket motors. Sampson also served as the Director of Mission Development and Operations of the Space Test Program at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California.

His patents included a binder system for propellants and explosives and a case bonding system for cast composite propellants. Both inventions are related to solid rocket motors. He received a patent, with George H. Miley, for a gamma-electrical cell on July 6, 1971.

On July 6, 1971, Sampson was awarded a patent for the "gamma-electric cell". The gamma-electric cell is a device that produces a high voltage from radiation sources, primarily gamma radiation, with proposed goals of generating auxiliary power from the shielding of a nuclear reactor. Additionally, the patent cites the cell's function as a detector with self power and construction cost advantages over previous detectors.
http://www.black-collegian.com/african/inventions605.shtml
Black Inventors and Inventions

[Yes_ABWH_Fan]

My brother was in US ARMY Satcom in 1968. He called us from Germany numerous times from a Satellite-linked backpack with a regular phone handset. The Army would send him to set up impromptu comm stations for such things as President Nixon trips, or when Apollo 13 got in trouble. For Apollo 13, he actually talked to the astronauts on that backpack handset. When he got out of the Army, he kept the chopped-off handset as a souvenier of his part in their rescue.

[FauxNews]

Mobile radio phones were around many years earlier, but I guess we can give him credit for figuring out how to bill people for the service.

[debbiecovell]

FYI - Jitterbug RIPS OFF the elderly. They have intentionally horrid customer service that makes it impossible for older people to communicate with them. Most people probably just throw their phones across the room and break them before they manage to get any help. I tell anyone who will listen to NEVER purchase a phone from this company. How sad that they take advantage of the elderly.

[FarmerJohn501]

Although your guest may have been the first to use a hand-held cell phone, I don't think he gave credit to Bell Labs for having the first cell phones in operation giving Motorola the idea of how the phones had to connect to the telephone network.
If you rode the train on the East coast that had pay phones that you could use while the train was moving, you talked on the first cell phones.

[Henri_Rochard]

When Marty Cooper dies, I hope he goes to Dante's Cell Phone Inferno.

Surrounded by cell phone airheads incessantly blathering on.

Although I normally don't condone violence, I think it would've been a just reward for Cooper to have someone in his family killed or maimed by an automobile driver yakking away on a cell phone and not paying attention to his/her driving.

Obviously, if Cooper hadn't invented the cell phone, someone else would have come up with a similar device eventually, but for now, the curse descends on Cooper.

[bjo1109]

I wish they would consider us older consumers who would like a phone with numbers/letters large enough to read without having to put on reading glasses (very inconvenient sometimes). Also, what about all the people who are hearing-impaired? A volume control, for both the ringer and the conversation, would be great.

[mike 901]

I thought Marconi discovered radio waves, and how to talk over them. So who's this clown ?

[Dr-Herb]

The Cell Phone,

I wish I had a contact to him or Samsung, I have an invention that will take it to another level, I've shared it with people I know and friends, they said do it!

So if Marty Cooper would contact me I will share that with him.

[OmegaWolf747]

I love my BlackBerry!