Music and the restoration of the super saver at 100 fighter. See the laboratories of Thomas Edison in fort myers and hear the voices of them mormon tabernacle choir and Salt Lake City today at noon eastern on book tv and sunday afternoon at 2 00 on American History tv on cspan3. Next, we will hear from martin cooper, a motorola researcher who headed a team that invented the first cell tach and1973, the dyna became the first person ever to make a call on the mobile phone. On a mobile phone. The phone cost almost 4000 when it was offered for sale in 1984. The Smithsonian National is his aim of American History hosted this hourlong event. Before i invite art and marty up to the stage, i have one piece of house business. Which probably, in this context, is ironic but i do have to ask you to turn off your cell phone. That said, thank you for coming, and i will turn the microphone over to art and our speaker, marty cooper. Thank you very much. [applause] are we turned on . Anybody that cannot hear me, say aye. Welcome, everybody. Welcome to the smithsonian institution. I have been looking forward to this for quite some time. Thanks for inviting me. You brought forth probably the most Ubiquitous Technology on the planet right now. It is a technology that is a game changer for technology. To begin with, it is still evolving. It is a platform for all kinds of other technologies that are spawned from it. It is having huge social impacts. Humans are the ultimate social animal, and this has to be the ultimate expansion of human beings, technologically. I want to start with the invention itself. This is something i know fascinates everybody here. I want to recreate that moment or moments of discovery of this phone. Let us start with the simple question of coordinates. When did it happen, and where were you . The time was 1973. Actually, november 1973. It was in my office is in illinois. I worked for motorola at the time. Just to give you a little flavor for what things were like in 1973, we did not have the internet. We did not have digital cameras. We did not have personal computers. We did not have large scale integrated circuits. These were really the old days. Ok. They were primitive times. [laughter] was there a moment of invention . And if so, when was that moment . I do not think inventions ever happen at a specific moment. It is like you spend your whole life building up to having an idea. I had been working for motorola for many years at that time. The cell phone was not my first invention. They were all in communications. But necessity is the mother of invention. The reason my colleagues and i and by the way, there were a lot of people involved in bringing the cell phone into commercial use. The idea to build the first one was mine, but it took a huge number of people even to build that phone. The concept of cellular telephony was invented by bell laboratories. Actually, that was an invention that kind of Group Starting in 1947, if you can imagine. That was really the old days. Somebody had an idea, and somebody else improved it a little bit. Not until 1969 at t were the Biggest Company in the world at that time. If you wanted to have a telephone in the United States, you had to get it from at t, and they would not even sell it to you. They would only rent it to you. They were a monopoly. They announced in 1969 that they were going to build this new idea called cellular radio. You can tell an engineer made up that name, because for most people, cellular does not mean a thing. Then, they announced weather conditions were. What their conditions were. First of all, they said there is no organization in the world that has enough money or enough technology to build this new system. We want a monopoly, just like we have had in every other telephone business. The second thing they said is, our understanding of what the market is, this is going to be car telephones. We did not believe in either of those things at motorola. First of all, we did not like monopolies. We believe in competition. We wanted an opportunity to participate. The second thing we believed is that people are basically mobile. Just think about it. Take a look at what happens on the beltway. We want the freedom to be able to walk around. All that traffic. You get the feeling like nobody is wear them want to be. Is where they want to be. Everybody wants to be someplace else. [laughter] for 100 years, the Telephone Company told us, if we wanted to talk to somebody at a distance, we had to be wired to our houses. We had to be chained to our desks. Now, they say, we want to free you from that wire. We are going to trap you in your car. That did not make any sense to us at all. [laughter] then, we discovered that the fcc, the Government Organization that assigns these radio frequencies, are about to make a decision. That is when things got dicey, and in november got dicey, in november of 1972. It sounded like they were going to make a decision that at t was going to get their way. That is when i decided, we have to do something really profound. We have to do a dazzling demonstration. And so i gathered together we are going to get to the demonstration in a minute. There are some steps in between. All right. To be continued. Definitely to be continued. Let me ask you this. You were at motorola at the time. Was there Something Special about being there, where you were, at motorola . Was there something about the corporate culture, the local culture in that area, that spawned this . Or the people . Was there Something Special about that time and place that made it happen when it did in 1973 . You bet. If there is one word i could use for what was different about motorola, it was the word passion. My colleagues at motorola were passionate about what they did. That meant that when you got up in the morning, you could not wait to get to work, because you were involved in ideas, taking things happen, and understanding things. It was the luckiest thing that ever happens to me, when i moved to motorola. People have asked me whether i made a lot of money out of all of these inventions i did. I tell them, when i joined motorola, they had a little document i had to sign that said i turned over all my future intellectual property to motorola, and for that they gave me a dollar. A dollar was a dollar then, remember. That was the best investment i ever made. Motorola provided me with the environment and the support. That may tell you, for somebody that was a maverick like i was, surviving in a corporation really said something about the corporation. I understand that they were willing to support this technology financially for some 20 years or so without earning a dime from it. Why do you think they get to have that deferred satisfaction with this . Why did that happen . We started the effort at t made the announcement in 1969. We knew this would have impact on our business, and we started to invest at that time, and continued to invest to the extent of we are talking about 1970 dollars. Overall, invested 100 million without selling a single product until 1983. It takes management to have an understanding. To let that happen. Not a usual expectation today of corporations. And you tell us something about the people who surrounded you, and how they helped create a nurturing environment, some of your colleagues that you were working with when you develop the cell phone . One of the issues was that we did not have much time. I had to pull together the people in our organization. Even though i ran a division at that time, the best people were not necessarily in my organization. The first people i approached were our industrial designers, none of whom worked for me. I told them what the concept was. We are going to build a cell phone. What is a cell phone . I described it to them. They got so excited that the head of the group stopped all work that they were doing for everybody else in our company. They did not stop charging for their time, but they stopped working for them, and they started working to create this new phone. Two weeks later, i bought them all dinner. And five designers showed me the phones they had created, and they were beautiful. They had a flip phone. Everybody here knows what a flip phone is. They had a slider phone. They had a phone that looked like a capsule. And then they had the phone we ended up selecting. When do i get to totally up to you. I ended up picking that phone. But they were wonderful. And this phone was this big. About the size of a modern cell phone. And then i had to get somebody to do the insides, because [laughter] this was just an empty box. We went to the engineers. I said before, we had all these new techniques that made things miniature. You had to put several thousand transistors. Into this thing and these were individual components coils, capacitors. The phone started growing and growing and growing. And by the time they got done, we ended up with a phone that we could take to new york, where we did a rehearsal, and then to washington, where we had to show it to the people we were trying to impress. Lets see the phone. Man. There it is. There we go. [laughter] [applause] you can see how big it is. It really grew. I really mean it. The other one was shaped like this, but it was this big. This phone weighs over a kilo, about 2. 5 pounds. The battery lasts for 20 minutes of talking. Not a problem. You could not hold it up for 20 minutes, it was so heavy. [laughter] but we took it to new york and to washington, and it did just what we wanted it to do. It got a lot of attention. People saw that you could make this work. We build a cellular system in new york and another one in washington. We took the congressmen, senators, and fcc commissioners for a drive through the city. A very carefully selected drive, as we knew it was going to work at every point along that drive. They got an idea of the vision that we had, of the freedom that you have when you can talk anywhere. And that was the beginning. Bravo. Is that when you first spoke on the cell phone, at that public demonstration . It was the first public call. The engineers did a lot of phone calls before they let me. Alexander graham bell said, mr. Watson, come here, i want to see you. Samuel morse keyed in, from the bible, what has god wrought. What did you say and who did you talk to . I have no idea where the idea came from. It occurred to me that our enemy was bell systems. And the guy that was running the bell system program, by no means an enemy, but he was certainly a rival, was a guy named joel engel. Joel, i apologize to you, if you are watching this broadcast. I called joel. Amazingly enough talk about a historic moment. He answered the phone himself, which in itself was an unusual event. I told him, joel, i am calling you from a cellular phone. But a real cellular phone. A personal, portable, handheld cellular phone. And there was silence at the other end of the line, for obvious reasons. And joel was very polite to me. He still is. But that turned out to be a historical moment, at least for me. Ask how long did it take him to pick himself up off the floor for the event . How long did it take . To get him off the floor. How important was the competition at bell labs for the birth of this instrument . The real competition was the idea of getting these radio channels assigned properly. And the fcc finally came through. Not too many months after we made our demonstrations in new york and in washington, the fcc announced that they were going to have competition, and that the industry would make a decision about what the nature of the system was going to be, not just bell laboratories. In the process of formalizing what they decided it ended up taking 10 years, because we had to finish the technology. We had to change the system that bell laboratories have come up with so that portables would work. Their system was designed for car telephones. And then the hardest part of all was, if there was going to be competition, you need competitors. Who were the competitors going to be . If there is one thing that governments do not do very quickly, it is make decisions. That process took, at least to those of us who were trying to see it happen it seemed to take forever. In october of 1983, the bell system turned on their commercial service in chicago. And a couple months later, here in washington, d c, and independent company turned on their system. The only difference to those systems was that there were portable phones in the washington system. Washington really was the i remember that time, and the cell phone was being proposed and tested in washington. I still could not figure out what it was about. You carry a phone booth around with you when you go . Obviously people dont, because you hear them all the time. Let us talk more about the competition. How important was the competition in terms of spurring the development of the cell phone. Would it have mattered if there were no bell labs computing with you . Competing with you . Interestingly enough, the bell system had enormous resources. And they were ready to offer their service, probably by 1980 or 1981. We actually held them off. The world would have seen cellular telephony sooner if we had not, we at motorola, had not been around. If you think about it, the bell system predicted that there would be, in the United States, as many as 2 million cell phones. And that would never grow any more than that. The maximum number of cell phones in the United States that were car phones was 2 million. That was a lot of phones at that time. But by the time we got to the 2 million point, people had realized the car phone was really not the object. Freedom was the object. And the car phone just went away. All phones became cellular phones. It is my view, and it is just an opinion, though we accelerated the introduction of portable telephony by some years. It would have happened anyway, because it was the right way to go. When was the patent . When was the key patent . Remember, all inventions every invention i do not know if you would agree with this is based upon other peoples inventions. I am a historian. I have to believe that. Otherwise, i have nothing to do. [laughter] even the wheel was based on who was that . [laughter] you are supposed to figure those things out. I was afraid of that. When was the patent . You did have a patent. I have read it. It was only for the portability part of it. It had to build a whole system to make it happen. When was the key patent . Issued in 1973. You are correct. [laughter] by the time these patents got implemented, they had almost run out. The patents themselves even bell system they never really were obstacles to anybody, and they also did not generate any money. We know about radio and walkietalkies and pagers and car phones. Possible predecessors for the cell phone. But where did the idea for the cell phone conference . Come from . First of all, anybody here know what cellular telephony is . Can you tell us in late terms, public terms i would understand . Ive had lunch with some really smart people today and had to teach them. Radio was invented the ideas for radio happened in the 19th century. The actual invention of radio itself it depends where you come from. If you come from britain or italy, marconi invented radio. If you happen to come from russia, every year, they celebrate radio day in honor of alexander popov. If you are from india, everyone knows a fellow named bose invented radio. In this country, we gave the patent to a guy named tesla, nikolai tesla. The koreans and japanese have not weighed in yet, but they are making all the radios now. Radio is not a new phenomenon. Radio grew marconis work happened at the turnofthecentury. Marconi is the first person to have actually sent a radio signal across the ocean. It was a very slow signal. You could only have one conversation like that in the whole world, when he did that. Hasnt radio changed a lot since then . The concept of twoway radio did not happen until about 30 years later. And the concepts of fm radio and today Digital Radio kind of grew. Radio has been a continually evolving technology. What about walkietalkies and pagers . Are those part of the roots of this . That is interesting. The concept of personal communications did not get launched until world war ii, when the army discovered that it was really important for them to be in contact with the infantrymen. They asked motorola to build a handheld radio. The Battery Technology was such at that time that the battery itself was about four times bigger than this phone. And the transistor had not been invented, so you had to have vacuum tubes. But motorola created a thing called the walkietalkie, which ended up being built by motorola and other companies. It was about this big, but it could be carried by a person. Now, we got the flavor of what this freedom was like of people being around. By 1970, we had reduced the size of this walkietalkie, and we had created a product much like the first cell phone, that we called a handy talkie. At that time, we were looking for something very portable and much lower in cost. My group came up with the radio pager. A pager started out being a very simple device that allowed you to be anywhere, and it just rang a bell. It just beeped to let you know somebody wanted to reach you. That really simple concept changed the lives of millions of people. Who am i talking about . Well, there were doctors who were trapped in their hospitals. The had a really sick patient. They wanted to know if anything had changed. Now, a doctor was free to attend to other patients, they could take a day off, because he knew that if there was an emergency, he could be reached. Profound change in the world. A little device like that. And of course, once we understood that, it became obvious that car telephones were not the answer. Personal communications was really going to be important. We have already talked about one invention depending on another, building on the accomplishments of others, and there are predecessors. That this is clearly a break, the cell phone. I think your answer is going to be no, but i will try again. Was there a eureka moment for you when you came up with this . Well, not really. There was a period of time when i had to persuade a bunch of other people, the management and all the people who worked on it, that this was a practical idea, that we ought to do it. If i really think about it, the genesis of this invention was really my entire life. I started out as a youngster. I do not know who introduced me to mythology, but i read every book that i could read about the gods and goddesses, this mythological world. I grew into science fiction. There are different kinds of engineers. Some engineers build things, and some engineers dream a lot. I do not have to tell you which kind i was. Is the