To needle the competition, Cooper used the Dyna-TAC prototype — which weighed 1.1 kilograms and was 28 centimetres long — to call to his rival at Bell Labs, owned by AT&T.

“The only thing that I was worried about: ‘Is this thing going to work?’ And it did,” he said.

The call helped kick-start the mobile phone revolution, but looking back on that day Cooper acknowledges, “we had no way of knowing this was the historic moment.”

‘You ingest food, you create energy. Why not have this receiver for your ear embedded under your skin, powered by your body?’

Mobile phone inventor Martin Cooper

He spent the better part of the next decade working to bring a commercial version of the device to market, helping to launch the wireless communications industry and, with it, a global revolution in how we communicate, shop and learn about the world.

Still, Cooper said he’s “not crazy” about the shape of modern smartphones, blocks of plastic, metal and glass. He thinks phones will evolve so that they will be “distributed on your body,” perhaps as sensors “measuring your health at all times.”

Batteries could even be replaced by human energy.

“You ingest food, you create energy. Why not have this receiver for your ear embedded under your skin, powered by your body?” he imagined.

Various internets

While he dreams about what the future might look like, Cooper is attuned to the industry’s current challenges, particularly around privacy.

In Europe, where there are strict data privacy rules, regulators are concerned about apps and digital ads that track user activity, allowing technology and other companies to build up rich profiles of users.

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“It’s going to get resolved, but not easily,” Cooper said. “There are people now that can justify measuring where you are, where you’re making your phone calls, who you’re calling, what you access on the Internet.”

Smartphone use by children is another area that needs limits, Cooper said. One idea is to have “various internets curated for different audiences.”

Five-year-olds should be able to use the internet to help them learn, but “we don’t want them to have access to pornography and to things that they don’t understand,” he said.

As for his own phone use, Cooper says he checks email and does online searches for information to settle dinner table arguments.

However, “there are many things that I have not yet learned,” he said. “I still don’t know what TikTok is.”

AP

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