Martin Cooper needs no introduction. Thanks to him, we have smartphones and mobile phones, and even at 86 years old, his brilliance remains intact. The team at Motherboard conducted an interview with Cooper, in which the engineer talks about the past and future of the mobile phone. However, he is also very critical of its present, considering current models “suboptimal” and the modern concept of an app “wrong”.
The First Call and Its Political Context
Martin Cooper was not only the creator of the first personal cell phone, but also the first to do a bit of trolling with that device. The original call made with that historic prototype on April 3, 1973, was to Joel Engel, Cooper's counterpart at Bell Labs, the R&D division of AT&T at the time. Believe it or not, the creation of the mobile phone carried significant political weight. The FCC was about to extend AT&T's monopoly in telephony, giving the company a sort of blank check over cellular communication, but Martin and his team's demo changed everything. On the other hand, AT&T's mobile option was nothing more than installing twelve kilograms of equipment in a car and, according to Motorola's vision, locking yourself in it to talk on the phone.
42 Years Later
Cooper recounts this story and many others in his interview for Motherboard. A striking detail about that first mobile phone and its public test was the need to keep an engineer “on hold”, since the prototype had been built with thousands of parts, and anything could fail. He also added that the invention of the mobile phone was probably as crucial as the invention of the wheel. In earlier years, Cooper acknowledged some of the new problems caused by the mobile phone, but he always believed the benefits were superior. The richest part of the interview focused on the present of mobile telephony. Martin thinks it is still in its infancy, and that it will take “a couple more generations” for the device to fulfill all its promises. At the same time, he was quite harsh with the most recent models, which he called “suboptimal” and declared it “unnatural” to speak with such a thin piece against our ear.
The Present and Future of Mobile Telephony
Cooper's criticisms didn't end there. He sees the concept of an app as “wrong”, and considers it useless to have a million apps, when the user cannot find the one that best suits their needs.
Martin's solutions to these problems are yet to come. He had already mentioned it before, but he insists on the idea that the mobile phone will become a compact subcutaneous device, accompanied by other similar accessories that report information about our health (just as wearables do today), coordinated through a personal server in constant communication with the rest of the globe. And on the apps side, he spoke about a practical application of artificial intelligence, through a personal assistant that anticipates needs and presents solutions. Instead of the user having to search for an app, it will be the app that will have to search for the user. To close, a thought loaded with a hint of sadness: Cooper knows he won't be here to see all that, but he settles for dreaming it, and at the same time, living it in advance. A titan among us. Let's enjoy him.
