Martin Cooper

Speaker Bio

Martin Cooper is an engineer, inventor, entrepreneur and futurist. He conceived the first portable cellular phone in 1973 and is cited in the Guinness Book of World Records for making the first cellular phone call. He’s often called ‘the father of the cell phone’. He has been working on the technology of personal wireless communications for over 50 years.

In 1954 Cooper started at Motorola and over the next three decades worked on many projects involving wireless communications such as the first radio-controlled traffic-light system and the first handheld police radios, as well as the first portable cell phone for consumers, the DynaTAC 8000X, otherwise known as ‘The Brick’.

A serial entrepreneur, he and his wife, Arlene Harris, cofounded numerous wireless technology companies including Cellular Business Systems, Cellular PayPhone, Subscriber Computing, SOS Wireless Communications, GreatCall, and ArrayComm. Cooper is currently chairman of Dyna LLC and a member of the FCC’s Technological Advisory Council. He was the first to observe the Law of Spectrum Capacity, which became known as Cooper’s Law.

In 2013 Cooper received the Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering. He was also awarded the Marconi Prize and has been inducted into the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame and Wireless History Foundation’s Wireless Hall of Fame. The Radio Club of America awarded him a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010. He is a lifetime member of the IEEE, was president of its Vehicular Technology Society and received its Centennial Medal. In 2007, Time magazine named him one of the “100 Best Inventors in History.” He is a Prince of Asturias Laureate.