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2: The basic issue is that people are fundamentally mobile.
7: So the idea of having wires to make a conversation is really not very natural.
13: My name is Marty Cooper
14: I conceived of and introduced the first portable,
18: oh excuse me.
21: hello, oh hi George.
22: George I'm really tied up at the moment.
25: Do you mind if I call you back?
28: Oh thank you so much. Bye now.
31: As I was saying,
33: I conceived of and introduced the first cellular telephone in April 1973.
47: Now the concept of cellular telephony is really very simple.
50: It breaks the city up into a into a lot of small areas which, being engineers we had to come up with a new name and we called them cells.
59: And the second concept is being able to move from one cell to another and having a continuous conversation.
69: The first public cellular call was made in New York.
74: I was with Motorola at that time and I thought a dramatic thing to do was to call my counterpart at AT&T.
81: So I dialed the phone and I said
87: 'hi Joel, it's Marty Cooper'
89: He said hi Marty
91: I said 'I'm calling you from my cell phone'.
95: And there was silence at the other end of the line.
100: The idea for the shape of the first phone started out with me approaching Motorola's design group.
108: I told them that I wanted to have a really dazzling design.
112: And two weeks later they had a flip phone, they had a slider phone.
116: But we selected this phone because it was simple.
120: What's important about any technology is that the technology is hopefully invisible, but at least transparent and maybe intuitive.
129: Think about it:
133: The purpose of technology is to make your life better.
136: Most cellphones don't do that very well.
140: In fact, they force us to become engineers, to learn a bunch of new things,
145: And we shouldn't have to do that.
148: The ideal phone would be one where I would just talk to the phone, or maybe the phone would read my mind, and it would do things to make my life better.
160: And we, all of us, have all these complicated phones,
163: and they all try to be universal.
166: If you try to build a device that does all things for all people, it won't do any of them very well.
175: So I think that's where we are with cellphones today.
:
Who invented the mobile phone ('Cell phone' in American English), and what does he think about the current generation of smartphones? Another excellent video from the PBS inventor series.
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"Necessity is the mother of invention. I want to photograph the rest of the family." Step behind the lens of New York-based photographer David Friedman for a rare snapshot into the lives of the world's most inspiring creators. Episodes every other Thursday.