He pioneered the cellphone. It changed how people around the world talk to each other – and don't

The Star

03-07-2025

DEL MAR, California: Dick Tracy got an atom-powered two-way wrist radio in 1946. Marty Cooper never forgot it.
The Chicago boy became a star engineer who ran Motorola's research and development arm when the hometown telecommunications titan was locked in a 1970s corporate battle to invent the portable phone. Cooper rejected AT&T's wager on the car phone, betting that America wanted to feel like Dick Tracy, armed with "a device that was an extension of you, that made you reachable everywhere.'
Fifty-two years ago, Cooper declared victory in a call from a Manhattan sidewalk to the head of AT&T's rival program. His four-pound DynaTAC 8000X has evolved into a global population of billions of smartphones weighing mere ounces apiece. Some 4.6 billion people – nearly 60% of the world – have mobile internet, according to a global association of mobile network operators.
The tiny computers that we carry by the billions are becoming massive, interlinked networks of processors that perform trillions of calculations per second – the computing power that artificial intelligence needs. The simple landlines once used to call friends or family have evolved into omnipresent glossy screens that never leave our sight and flood our brain with hours of data daily, deluging us with endless messages, emails, videos and a soundtrack that many play constantly to block the outside world.
From his home in Del Mar, California, the inventor of the mobile phone, now 96, watches all of this. Of one thing Cooper is certain: The revolution has really just begun.
The phone is about to become a thinking computer
Now, the winner of the 2024 National Medal of Technology and Innovation – the United States' highest honour for technological achievement – is focused on the cellphone's imminent transition to a thinking mobile computer fueled by human calories to avoid dependence on batteries. Our new parts will run constant tests on our bodies and feed our doctors real-time results, Cooper predicts.
"That will let people anticipate diseases before they happen,' Cooper envisions. "People are going to die from old age and accidents but they're not going to die from disease. That's a revolution in medicine."
Human behaviour is already adapting to smartphones, some observers say, using them as tools that allow overwhelmed minds to focus on quality communication.
Sarasvati Devi talks to her mother in Myanmar via video call as Ranjan, her brother, holds the phone, outside a camp for Hindu refugees near Kutupalong, Bangladesh, Sept. 26, 2017.
The phone conversation has become the way to communicate the most intimate of social ties, says Claude Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of America Calling: A Social History Of The Telephone To 1940 .
For almost everyone, the straight-up phone call has become an intrusion. Now everything needs to be preceded by a message. "There seems to be a sense that the phone call is for heart-to-heart and not just for information exchange,' Fischer says.
And this from a 20-year-old corroborates that: "The only person I call on a day-to-day basis is my cousin,' says Ayesha Iqbal, a psychology student at Suffolk County Community College. "I primarily text everyone else.'
Child education student Katheryn Ruiz, 19, concurs, saying "texting is used for just like nothing substantial, like nothing personal'.
Sometimes the roles are reversed, though. Sixty-eight-year-old Diana Cunningham of Overbrook, Kansas, pop. 1005, uses a group text to stay in touch with her kids and grandkids. Her 18-year-old granddaughter Bryndal Hoover, a senior at nearby Lawrence High School, says she prefers voice calls over texting because then I can understand, 'Oh, how should I go about a conversation?''
When she was a girl, Karen Wilson's family shared a party line with other phone customers outside Buffalo, New York. Wilson, 79, shocked her granddaughter by telling her about the party line when the girl got a cellphone as a teenager.
"What did you do if you didn't wait?'' the girl asked. Responded her grandmother: "`You went down to their house and you yelled, 'Hey, Mary, can you come out?''
The brave new world has a price
Many worry about the changes exerted by our newly interconnected, highly stimulated world.
We increasingly buy online and get products delivered without the possibility of serendipity. There are fewer opportunities to greet a neighbour or store employee and find out something unexpected, to make a friend, to fall in love. People are working more efficiently as they drown.
"There's no barrier to the number of people who can be reaching out to you at the same time and it's just overwhelming,' says Kristen Burks, an associate circuit judge in Macon, Missouri.
Most importantly, sociologists, psychologists and teachers say, near-constant phone-driven screen time is cutting into kids' ability to learn and socialise. A growing movement is pushing back against cellphones' intrusion into children's daily lives.
A growing movement is pushing back against cellphones' intrusion into children's daily lives.
"At the turn of the millennium, technology companies based on the West Coast of the United States created a set of world-changing products,' New York University social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation , which has been on The New York Times bestseller list for a year.
"By creating a firehose of addictive content that entered through kids' eyes and ears, and by displacing physical play and in-person socialising, these companies have rewired childhood and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale,' he writes.
Seven US states have signed – and twenty states have introduced – statewide bell-to-bell phone bans in schools. Additional states have moved to prohibit them during teaching time.
That doesn't sit well with the smartphone's inventor, who says there are better solutions than regulation. "Accommodating disruptive technologies requires disruptive solutions,' Cooper wrote from Del Mar. "Wouldn't it be better for teachers to integrate the cellphone that provides access to all the information in the world?'
Global inequality is an issue
That advantage is coming to rich countries faster than poor ones.
Many worry about the changes exerted by our newly interconnected, highly stimulated world.
The first time that Nnaemeka Agbo had to leave his family in Nigeria for a prolonged period, life shuttled him to Russia for studies, like many other young Nigerians increasingly desperate to relocate to seek better opportunities.
Adjusting to life in Russia when he moved there in 2023 was tough, he says, but one thing kept him going; WhatsApp calls with family. "One thing that kept me sane was calling home every time, and it made me feel closer to my people,' the 31-year-old says.
In a country that has one of the world's highest poverty and hunger levels despite being Africa's top oil producer, Agbo's experience mirrors many young people in Nigeria increasingly forced to choose between remaining at home with family or aiming at a better life elsewhere. At least 37% of African adults expressed their desire to live somewhere else in 2023, the highest rate in the world, according to a Gallup survey published in October last year.
A woman talks on her mobile phone in downtown Nairobi, Kenya. In Africa, where only 37% of the population had Internet access in 2023, according to the International Telecommunication Union, regular mobile calls are the only option many have.
For many, phone calls blur the distance and offer comfort.
"No matter how busy my schedule is, I must call my people every weekend, even if that's the only call I have to make,' Agbo says.
In Africa, where only 37% of the population had Internet access in 2023, according to the International Telecommunication Union, regular mobile calls are the only option many have. In northern Nigeria's Zamfara state, Abdulmalik Saidu says the mobile connectivity rate is so low that "sometimes we stay for weeks without network.'
When 19-year-old Shamsu Deen-Cole flew from Sierra Leone to the United States to study international relations in 1971, making a call to his parents in Sierra Leone would take days, starting with telling his parents when to expect the call. Calls would cost around US$150 for under 10 minutes. "There was no time for extra talks or complimentary because it would all add up in cost,' recalls Deen-Cole, 73.
Tabane Cissé, who moved from Senegal to Spain in 2023, makes phone calls about investing Spanish earnings at home. Otherwise, it's all texts, or voice notes, with one exception.
His mother doesn't read or write, but when he calls "it's as if I was standing next to her,' Cissé says. "It brings back memories – such pleasure.'
He couldn't do it without the cell phone. And half a world away, that suits Marty Cooper just fine.
"There are more cell phones in the world today than there are people,' Cooper says. "Your life can be made infinitely more efficient just by virtue of being connected with everybody else in the world. But I have to tell you that this is only the beginning.' – AP