By Husain on 16 Mar, 2010 at 9:03 PM

eGameFame — Martin Cooper, the man who created the Cellphone

I thought in this week’s eGameFame we could pay tribute to someone whose hard work has made millions and millions of people’s lives easier. Who is this person and what did he do you may be thinking about right now? His name is Martin Cooper and he is the creator of the cell phone. Yes, you heard me right. He invented the device that makes our lives and our work so much easier.

He truly had a humble and hard beginning; he grew up in Chicago during the great depression a really sad time and hard time, even more so compounded by the fact that his parents were Ukrainian immigrants. Working hard he received his Electrical Engineering in 1950 from the Illinois Institute of Technology but this is where things got interesting.

Martin Cooper then went onto join the Reserve Officers Training Corps and served on a US Navy destroyer during the Korean War and later on a submarine stationed in Hawaii. Here we have a military man with a degree in electrical engineering. Luckily he did not die in the war, otherwise who knows when we would have actually got a cell phone concept.

After the war he went to work at Teletype a subsidiary of Western Electric. 1954 is where things really started to form the basis for his work, he left Teletype and went to Motorola. While there he would take night classes to earn his Masters in Electrical Engineering, where after he also taught classes at the same university.

What really made him a move and a shaker was when he corrected a problem in their design and was there after made the lead in charge of the car phone division by John F. Mitchell. He decided what it would be like to have a rather smaller more mobile version and thus in 90 days they created a prototype. They made history by making the first call on a handheld cell phone prototype on April 3, 1973, in front of reporters and passers-by on a New York City street. That first call, placed to Dr. Joel S. Engel who was the head of research at Bell Labs, began a fundamental technology and communications market shift toward making phone calls to a person instead of to a place. It was the product of his vision for personal wireless handheld telephone communications, distinct from mobile car phones. It is not true, although widely reported; watching Captain Kirk using his communicator on the television show Star Trek inspired him to develop the handheld mobile phone.

After that he formed a couple of companies which delved into technology related things which were focused on cell related things which are running till today.

Some trivia, he received an award in 1995, Cooper received the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award for his technological innovations in the communication field. Cooper is also a member of Mensa. Martin Cooper was mentioned in Red Herring’s Top ten Entrepreneurs of 2000. In 2009, he along with Raymond Tomlinson was awarded the Prince of Asturias award for scientific and technical research. Cooper was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in February of 2010.

So there you have it, the birth of the cell phone — and I think we have to congratulate the creators of Star Trek as they may have indirectly influenced the creation of the cell phone.

source:Wikipedia

eGameFame is your chance to let us review someone in the gaming world. Give us your thoughts or opinions and we'll be sure to include these to our delightful story. So, if you'd like us to write about somebody, don't hold back, email us. -- This series has been discontinued.