Father of cellphone sees dark side, also hope in new tech
‘My most negative opinion is we don’t have privacy’
BARCELONA, Spain — The man credited with inventing the cellphone 50 years ago had just one concern about the brick-sized device with a long antenna: Would it work? These days, Martin Cooper frets like everybody else about his invention’s impact on society — from the loss of privacy to the risk of internet addiction to the rapid spread of harmful content, especially among kids.
“My most negative opinion is we don’t have privacy because everything about us is now recorded someplace and accessible to somebody who has enough intense desire to get it,” said Cooper, who spoke with the Associated Press at the telecom industry’s biggest trade show in Barcelona, where he was receiving a lifetime award.
Yet, the 94-year-old selfdescribed dreamer also marvels at how far cellphone design and capabilities have advanced, and he believes the technology’s best days may still be ahead in such areas as education and health care.
“Between the cellphone and medical technology and the internet, we are going to conquer disease,” he said Monday at the Mobile World Congress.
Cooper, whose invention was inspired by Dick Tracy’s radio wristwatch, said he also envisions a future in which cellphones are charged by human bodies.
Cooper made the first public call from a handheld portable telephone on a New York City street on April 3, 1973, using a prototype that his team at Motorola had started designing just five months earlier.
To needle the competition, Cooper used the Dyna-TAC prototype — which weighed 2.5 pounds and was 11 inches long — to call 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.