Martin (Marty) Cooper is a true pioneer in the wireless industry. He was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1928. In 1953 during the Korean War, he served as a submarine officer in the U. S. Navy. Marty joined Motorola in 1954 as a senior development engineer with a focus on mobile equipment. By the 1970s he was Corporate Director of R&D.
As division manager at Motorola, Marty led the team of engineers that created the DynaTAC 8000x, also known as “the Brick”, in 1973. This model weighed 2.5 lbs., was 10 inches long and had 30 minutes of talk time. It was on this prototype that he made the first handheld phone call on 6th Ave. in New York City on April 3, 1973. Marty and his team filed for a patent for the Radio Telephone System, on October 17, 1973. Motorola and others continued cell phone development for the next 10 years until the FCC allocated spectrum for cellular systems in 1983. Marty’s teams also introduced nationwide car phones and radio pagers, as well as the first digitally trunked land mobile dispatch system.
After 29 years at Motorola, Marty started several businesses in the 1980s including Cellular Business Systems, a cellular billing company, and ArrayComm, which became a world leader in smart antenna technology. Marty and his wife, Arlene Harris co-founded GreatCall, Inc., maker of the Jitterbug phone. Since 1986, he has been Chairman and Co-Founder of Dyna LLC. Marty has been a member of the boards of directors of several public and private companies, and served on several advisory committees of the U.S. Government including the FCC Technological Advisory Council and the Department of Commerce CSMAC. He has been granted eleven patents.
Marty holds a B.S. and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology at which he taught and on whose board of Trustees he serves. For his significant technology contributions to wireless communications over the last 60 years, Marty has received numerous awards including: the IEEE Centennial Medal, the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award, the Radio Club of America Lifetime Achievement Award, the Webby Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the 2013 Marconi Prize. He has been widely published and is the author of Cutting the Cord. Today, Marty resides in Del Mar, CA with his wife Arlene and promotes the effective use of the radio spectrum to serve people worldwide.
Inducted to the Hall of Fame in 2000.