�糵����

Illinois Tech alumnus, former professor, and university life trustee Marty Cooper (EE ’50, M.S. ’57)—a pioneering visionary in the field of mobile communications who’s considered the “Father of the Cell Phone”—has been awarded the prestigious (NMTI) in a ceremony held today at the White House. This award, bestowed by the president of the United States, is the nation’s highest honor for technological achievement and recognizes leaders who have made lasting contributions to America’s competitiveness, standard of living, and quality of life through innovation, placing him among an elite group of trailblazers who have reshaped industries and enhanced the quality of life for millions worldwide. Cooper sat down with Illinois Tech Communications Director Petra Kelly to discuss his innovation journey. In this candid interview, Cooper shares his thoughts on the past, present, and future of technology, his enduring connection to Illinois Tech, and his passion for using innovation to improve the human experience.

Transcript

Petra Kelly: Thank you for sitting down with me today! Do you mind if I call you Marty, or do you prefer Martin?

Marty Cooper: Marty is just fine.

Petra Kelly: First, congratulations on this extraordinary honor. Everyone at Illinois Tech is so proud!

Marty Cooper: Yeah, it’s very good. This is an exciting kind of something, although you wonder why they waited fifty-one years. But other than that, they made it. [ Laughs ] I'm still vertical, and very active in the industry.

Petra Kelly: This National Medal of Innovation and Technology places you among luminaries like Steve Jobs, Grace Hopper, and Vinton Cerf. How does it feel to join such a distinguished group?

Marty Cooper: Yeah, the world has been very kind to me. It took us about twenty years for people to realize that the cell phone was going to be important. For the first twenty years, it was just a side issue. But I’m very grateful to the world for whatever recognition I’ve gotten, and I’m especially grateful for the president to make this award to me, so I’m a happy camper.

And, by the way, anything that publicizes the importance of technology and the future of humanity is important to me. I think that there is not enough understanding of how technology is going to improve the human experience in every way.
  
Eliminate poverty, eliminate disease, increase the whole educational experience: all these things are going to happen in a revolutionary way in the coming years. And I think it ’ s about time for that to happen.

The Importance of an Educated Populace

Petra Kelly: What do you think are going to be some major technological developments and transformations in the future? Are there particular developments that you’re most excited about?

Marty Cooper: Well, let me start out by saying that the driving force in my approach to life is people. Technology is meaningless without that. And I’ve been lecturing on that for my whole career. The people that talked to me while we were actually developing the cell phone in 1972 and in ’73, my mantra was, people are mobile, and yet for over 120 years we have been told that the only way to communicate with people at a distance was with a wire connection. 

Technology is the application of science to create products and services that make people’s lives better. I think that there is not a lot of recognition of that, but more and more as people get more educated, there’s more and more understanding of how technology is going to solve all of our problems. And if you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m an optimist.

I really do think things are getting better, and what does it start out with? Education.

An educated populace will not go to war. An educated populace will be more efficient in everything, which means there won’t be any poor people there, because even in today’s world there’s enough for everybody. We just haven’t figured out how to distribute it. And as science keeps improving, we are going to solve the big problems.

Role of Universities in Shaping Innovators

Petra Kelly: Your commitment to education and technology education shows through very strongly in your involvement with Illinois Tech. What do you think the role of universities like Illinois Tech is in shaping the next generation of technology pioneers?

Marty Cooper: Well, Illinois Tech has a special approach to technology. It’s a very practical approach, and that’s the thing that I have appreciated in my entire career, including serving as a trustee at Illinois Tech. The fact that we’re talking about immediate problems—about how engineers solve the kinds of problems that I’ve been talking about: productivity, disease. 

Illinois Tech’s approach is unique. They still teach you theory, and they do it very effectively. But they put a lot of emphasis on hands-on understanding of the real human problem. And that is a unique approach at Illinois Tech. They do it better than any university in their class.

Innovation and Technology: Solving Human Problems

Petra Kelly: Your work on the first handheld cell phone was driven by a desire to free people from being tethered to desks and cars. Reflecting on this, what do you think we’re metaphorically “tethered” to today? What types of problems should today’s innovators focus on solving to enhance human lives, much like your work with mobile communication does?

Marty Cooper: Let me do a little segue from that, because that’s a very good question. What kind of background does it take to invent a mobile phone? It turns out that most of my career at Motorola was in two-way radios, radio pagers, and things of that nature. It’s there that I discovered how important it is to be able to communicate with people on the go in order to solve the everyday problems of humanity. It starts out with police departments and fire departments. They can’t exist without continuous communication of vehicles and people, and it turns out that when we launched the radio paging business, the people that benefited the most at the beginning were doctors.

Doctors had a level of freedom they never had before. A doctor used to have to stay in the hospital if he had patients that were in trouble. Now, he had the freedom to move places because he could be reached any time. That was when my team and I started the first nationwide paging business. So, when AT&T announced they were going to come up with something they called cellular communications and identified it as being car telephones, we thought that was ridiculous.

The time was right to give people the freedom to communicate wherever they were at any time. Of course, we were right. We had a battle with AT&T for 13 years. It was uncertain what the answer was going to be until around 1980, when the government decided that the systems providing cellular service could do both portable and mobile communications. That decision made all the difference. Without it, we might not have cell phones today, or they might not have developed as they have.

The Role of Industry Competition in Innovation

Petra Kelly: You’ve just alluded to it, so what do you think about the role of industry competition in innovations and developments of this kind?

Marty Cooper: That’s a good question. The leadership of America in technology, which is pretty well established now, is dependent upon competition, and the situation in telecommunications is a perfect example of that. Because Bell Laboratories, back in the 1950s and ’60s, were part of a monopoly.

There was one telecommunications company in the US. They were the biggest company in the world. Their research arm, Bell Laboratories, was amazing because they did beautiful things, but they did that on their own timetable and without any pressure of competition. We didn’t discover how much the telecommunications industry could explode until it became competitive.

That competition supercharged technology and especially telecommunications technology in the United States. It demonstrated to the world the importance of competition in technology as well as in everything else.

Personal Rivalries in the Technology Community Spurring Progress

Petra Kelly: That’s the importance of competition in the industry and fostering innovation. But I was reading about that first cell phone call that you made ringing your counterpart at Bell Labs. How much of a role do you think personal rivalries within the technology community help with these kinds of innovations? 

Marty Cooper: Well, Motorola was the worldwide leader in personal communications for many years. And it’s there that I learned about the importance of competition because we were driven by it. If somebody started to demonstrate a capability of doing things better than we could, we would characterize that as a failure on our part.

And, of course, we were the target for everybody else. So, all of that pressure could—it was all in the public interest. It all resulted in people working harder, trying to be better than the other person. And the result of that is rapid advancement of technology.

It used to take, from the time we demonstrated a working handheld portable system to when you could actually buy one commercially, ten years. Today, people will announce a new technology, and two or three years later, people are actually using it. The explosion in artificial intelligence is a demonstration of that—people announce a new platform for artificial intelligence, and from the time they create it to the time it’s announced, it’s a year. That was unimaginable ten or twenty years ago.

Of course, it requires an educated populace to do that. And without the universities preparing people for that competition, it wouldn’t exist at all.

The Innovation Process: From Identifying a Human Need to Going to Market

Petra Kelly: So, I was looking through the National Medal of Technology and Innovation process. It seems that the business or consumer impact of the innovators is baked into the award process and criteria. You’ve thanked Bob Galvin at Motorola before for sticking with the cell phone project despite not having projected revenue. How important is it to have a strong business purpose for innovation at the outset?

Marty Cooper: Sure. Well, of course, as you presented it, let’s start—the process starts out with a human need. If there’s a real need, then the next step in the process is coming up with a solution.

And very often that solution requires new technology, whether it’s a new process or a new kind of device, and that always requires investment. The next stage, after you find a potential solution, is to figure out how to execute. How do you actually come up with a product that can be reproduced economically? Because the whole idea of the cell phone and all these other modern wonders is that everybody can have one.

There are more cell phones in the world today than there are people. Almost 80 percent of the people in the world have cell phones—that’s never occurred with any technology in the past. It’s just incredible.

But in order to create that industry, there were thousands and thousands of engineers developing things. There were businesspeople creating a business case. There were financial people figuring out how to get the money to develop all of these things, and all that is still going on today.

It takes huge investments to build semiconductor factories, for example. You can’t even start making a chip that is the focus of a cell phone without building a multibillion-dollar factory just to build that one chip. It is the center of the cell phone. So that’s another example of how free enterprise allows all of these requirements—the determination of the human need, the research that makes the devices and systems available, the development that turns ideas into products, the manufacturing ability. And then, on top of that, creating the business model that allows for huge financial investments.

Importance of Technology Innovators with Diverse Experiences

Petra Kelly: We’ve spoken about Illinois Tech’s practical approach, and the importance of an educated populace and the university’s commitment to educate people from all walks of life. You mentioned that your experience at Motorola and understanding of the first groups of people that you really saw needed to be on the go: doctors, emergency services personnel framed your development of the cell phone.

How important is it for technologists, innovators, to have these diverse and practical experiences outside of technology to find that that human need that spurs technological development?

Marty Cooper: Here, you know, the traditional image of the engineer is a nerd. But a nerd who is divorced from society is not a very good technologist, because he doesn’t understand the human experience. A good engineer has to be part of society.

What I’m doing now is facing a problem that I personally have. My hearing is extraordinarily bad. And would you believe there are many millions of people in this country today that have similar problems to mine, and a lot of them, even worse. The solutions that society has offered these people are inadequate. They don’t work. Hearing aids do not work, at least for me they don’t.

So, I have invented a new kind of hearing aid. And I call it a speech aid: focused on not just hearing everything, but being able to in any environment, whether people talking around you, whether they’re reverberation, whether it’s noise and no matter what kind of speech they have, that you will be able. A person with severe hearing disability will be able to understand every word that somebody says focused on speech, not on listening to music, not on listening to other kinds of sounds.

You understand that as a real invention, if I told it to you, I would lose all the patent rights. And that’s exactly what I am proposing to do: let the world know about this idea so that nobody can patent the idea so we have a lot of competition. I just want you to know that I actually execute the things that I believe in.

This gives you an illustration of what the process is: you have a human need, and then you come up with a unique solution.

Current Innovation Process: Speech Aid to Connect People

Petra Kelly: This invention is connected but in a different direction from things that you’ve worked on before. What’s been most exciting about learning new technologies in developing the hearing aid? I can imagine things like speech versus ambient noise filtering has come up. What excites you most?

Marty Cooper: It turns out it’s like every other invention—there’s no such thing as a hundred percent new invention anymore. Every invention is based upon previous inventions, and if you look around enough, you find all kinds of pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. A little piece of solution like, how do you detect speech in noise? How do you figure out how you can make somebody hear something that their ears don’t normally hear? All these things are in the art in other places. Now, how do you put all of those things together and make them work so that you really understand how to work it?

And I’ll tell you with great humility—I have a lot of trouble working my cell phone from time to time. [ Laughs ] You cannot have a hearing aid that requires you to manipulate anything. It’s got to be there and just do it.

So, in this case, the solution is the integration of a lot of other technologies. That is true of almost every invention—integrating the existing technologies and making them, first of all, easy for people to use, and second of all, economic so that everybody can afford to do it. The result of that is a whole class of people in society who, before, without this invention, are unproductive. And in the worst case, they just die. It sounds like a rough way to put it, but if you’re disconnected from society and you can’t communicate, what alternative is there?

So, if this solution really works, we are going to save the lives of millions of people. Not just save their lives, but make them productive, make them use a lifetime of wisdom to help other people.

Predictions for the Future of Social Media and Communications

Petra Kelly: Loneliness is a genuine medical global epidemic, people being disconnected. Along those lines, you've spoken before, I think, to Illinois Tech Magazine about your predictions for the future of social media technology and how people connect and communicate with each other. Has your view changed of the outlook, of how we’re going to connect with each other?

Marty Cooper: Well, of course, people don’t realize that from us, from a long-range viewpoint, we are still in the early days of even things like social media.

We haven’t yet perfected what social media even is. There are some of their different versions, and they keep, all of them, evolving. I don’t use very many social media tools, but it sounds like you do. You’re connected. And have you noticed that you keep changing? They keep changing the systems. They’re still evolving.

So, the idea of people being connected is super important because if they’re connected, they’re not dealing with just facts, they’re not dealing with just money. They’re dealing with other people, and it changes their whole perspective. That basic concept, I think, is central to a future that has no poverty, no wars, and that is highly productive.

Role of AI in Solving Human Problems

Petra Kelly: What are your thoughts on AI's role in in all of this?

Marty Cooper: Well! [ Laughs ]

Petra Kelly: Sure, what do you think of humanity in general, could you put that in two sentences? I know, I know. [ Laughter ]

Marty Cooper: I think I told you before, I’m an optimist. I think that AI, first of all, has many, many impacts on the human experience. The way we’re doing it now is in its infancy. Ultimately, it is going to be extraordinarily valuable for society. It has introduced a whole new class of dangers, and these are not easily solvable dangers. They keep talking about how we will make rules and laws.

Well, good luck! Because, once you create a thinking entity—and I believe that artificial intelligence is getting very close to the ability to think on its own—how are we going to rein that in? We’d have a new problem. For years and years, we faced the problem of freedom. How much freedom can you allow people? Well, you know we have courts and laws and the old government to do that. There's nothing in that system that accommodates machines. What are we going to do now? When we get thinking machines, and the thinking machine says, “Wait a second. We have rights, too.” Now we’re going to have to have a new set of laws, and it’s going to be as complicated as the set of laws for people.

Future Focus of Technology Development in Education

Petra Kelly: What do you think should be major developments in technology education at the university level and high school level?

Marty Cooper: Well, education is a favorite topic of mine, and you know, just back to the segue of what am I doing now? I serve on a Technological Advisory Council that advises the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission. Much of the work of that Council is focused on things like 5G and 6G. While 5G and 6G are important for the long-range future, meanwhile, there’s nobody working on how to make sure that our children have access to all of the information on the internet in a safe way.

So that alone is a huge problem, and I think a much bigger problem than having artificial intelligence running factories. At least in this case, there are a lot of easier problems that have yet to be solved. What do we do now if you say that a child cannot grow up educated without having full-time access to the internet from the time they are six years old? And yet, there are parts of the country that don’t even have full-time access to the internet for anybody. And it is true today that a significant part of this country cannot access the internet either because there’s no service, or the service is not high-speed enough, or, more importantly, because they can’t afford it. The US has one of the highest costs of internet access of any country in the world. 

There are some fundamental problems in telecommunications that precede artificial intelligence. But amazingly enough, artificial intelligence is a solution to that. It’s a way of creating a new educational system that adapts itself to the needs of every student.

It doesn’t try to force every student to learn in exactly the same way. In effect, I know it’s a crazy way to put it, but an artificial intelligence—Petra’s artificial personal AI—could know enough about you, and it has access to all of the information in the world, to create an education for you that is personalized to your experience and your abilities.

Here, we are taking a fundamental problem that we have been working on for many years and applying a new technology, artificial intelligence, to solve that problem. I think we are going to have not just one internet but multiple internets so that we can make sure that children have access to an internet that is safe, and it doesn’t expose them to information that’s not useful for children. There is going to be a curated internet for education, and maybe more than one—maybe one for elementary school children and another one for high school children. So that’s an example of how new technology could solve other problems that make society better overall.

Importance of Access to Information and the Internet

Petra Kelly: You’ve spoken about the importance of ensuring that our children have access to all of the information on the internet in a safe way. What do you think about laws proposals like the one in Australia recently limiting social media access to people over sixteen?

Marty Cooper: It’s not just social media access. It’s access to everything. The reality is that historically, we depended on parents to limit that access. And we depended on the fact that it’s very hard to get access to everything. Now it’s so easy.

But the solution is not to limit the access: it’s to replace that access with suitable access.

Let me put it differently: if you want children to grow up to be responsible people who use social media in a useful way, do you think the best way to do it is to take it away from them completely when they’re young? That sounds very dumb to me. The best way to do it is to create a social media that is monitored, curated, and unique to youngsters, and then let them learn how to use social media in a safe environment.

And then, when they’ve learned how to do that, they graduate to social media that has no boundaries. Hopefully, by then, they’ve learned how to be responsible. That would be a way to describe what I would hope the future would be.

Advice for Young People: Be Curious and Keep Learning

Petra Kelly: What advice would you give to young people who aspire to follow in your footsteps? And what kind of personal behaviors, habits, characteristics do you think that they should focus on?

Marty Cooper: First of all, I do not suggest that everybody be like me; we’d have a terrible world if everybody was like me! [ Laughs ]

But what are the really basic elements? The most important thing in life is the ability to learn. I know—I said that, but of course, I disagree with myself, because the most important thing is having enough food to survive.

But from an intellectual point of view, if you’re not curious, if you don’t want to learn new things, if you don’t have a mind that can accept new things, you will not be able to keep up with society. You will not ever learn how to be creative. You will never learn how to do a skilled job of any kind. And as we have discussed before, the world is changing so fast you won’t be able to keep up. And it’s been demonstrated very clearly that the ability to learn is something that’s got to be practiced. If you stop learning—and a lot of people do, by the way—that’s what we people call retirement. [ Laughs ]

And having said that, I’ve retired many times, but I always come back!

But if you stop learning, you lose the ability to learn. And think about how horrible that could be—you would not be able to keep up with everything that’s going on. People tell me, “Well, with the right kind of tools, everybody could relearn learning.” But it becomes much harder and harder each time. 

So, number one, be curious, and believe that your brain can accommodate everything—all of it. Everything that you study, that you look at. Learning ought to be enjoyable, and there is enough room in the human brain to accommodate lots and lots of stuff—much more than we’re ever exposed to.

Be Useful, Use Your Mind, and Connect People

Petra Kelly: It sounds to me like this fits in quite heavily with what you’re working on right now. This commitment to lifelong learning, curiosity, and connection: your current work with the hearing aid and other innovations seems part of a drive that you have of connecting people at all stages of their life.

Do you have an ethos there? Is there a common thread that you see reflecting on all of the technological developments that you've been involved in? Not just the cell phone?

Marty Cooper: Yeah. Well, I think it’s important to be useful. I haven’t faced that problem until my hair turned gray, which happened in my case at a very early age. I don’t know what kind of dietary deficiency I had, but it gets harder and harder as you get older to be useful. [ Laughs ]

And the alternative to that is, as I mentioned earlier, fading away. You know, some people get great satisfaction out of just playing golf. I was a lousy golfer when I tried to do it, and I finally ended up giving up. I’ve been a skier. I was a horseback rider. I’ve done everything, and one by one, I’ve had to give all the others up.

So, I now have the alternative of being useful in ways of using what’s left—my mind—or just giving up. I haven’t really thought about that before, which is a nice compliment to you, but at least as you get older, the challenge of being useful gets harder and harder.

People don’t respect—they give lip service to respecting older people. In general, they certainly don’t hire older people for sure, and they don’t pay too much attention to us either. I have to tell you that the world has been so nice to me that I do get some attention once in a while. But at the moment, I’m limited to intellectual kinds of things. So, I now have to find somebody like you who is super organized and can put all these things together and make them happen. [ Laughs ]

It’s all based upon one thing, and that is being able to observe, be curious, and use your mind.

Petra Kelly: From what you’ve said about your approach to these kinds of innovations, I would be willing to bet that disorganization is a valuable part of the creative process in the first instance. From what you said about the solution development, the business case and organization arise later.

Marty Cooper: I don’t argue with that at all, but I also suggest that if everybody was like me, we’d be in deep trouble!

Inspiring Young People in STEM

Petra Kelly: Just bringing it back to the award, because I know that we’re over time, and I just appreciate all the time that you that you’ve spent with me. Why do you think it’s important to have national awards like this to recognize technological and STEM achievements? How do you think it inspires future innovators?

Marty Cooper: Well, I hope it does, because one of the most important things I do—any opportunity I have to talk to younger people—I grab it. Because if I can inspire somebody to get excited about being in technology, to have a different viewpoint of how they contribute to society, to me, it’s kind of like the culmination of something that is useful to society and all my experience.

The thing about getting awards—the physical parts of it, you know—the world has been so nice to me. I have piles of awards around, but the fact that people will let me get exposed to the youngsters. As a matter of fact, let me show you something here.

[ Shows photograph ]

This is me surrounded by a bunch of children at an elementary school. And I could talk to children in an elementary school, I could talk to college students, and everybody in between. And one way or another, I find that I can connect with them. And the only reason people invite me to do that is because they see all these awards and stuff. They figure, “The guy that gets those kinds of awards must have something useful to say.”

So the awards themselves don’t mean a great deal, but the credibility that you get, and the ability to be exposed and to try to get the children more curious and more understanding of how they can contribute to society, is one of the things that’s high on my list of things to do.

Petra Kelly: I would think also that those children are—that’s something they’ll look back on later in life: that they had a one-on-one conversation, they had an interaction with somebody who’s won an award of this kind of prominence.

Community of Support

Petra Kelly: Are there specific people that you want to acknowledge or thank in relation to the award?

Marty Cooper: Well, of course, I have a lot of gratitude to Illinois Tech for the fact that I attended, actually taught at night school there for a while, and was active in the alumni organization for many years. I’ve also been on the board of trustees for many years. 

I’d like to thank the management of Motorola—specifically Bob Galvin, who was the son of the founder of Motorola, and John Mitchell, who was my boss for many years at Motorola—all of whom tolerated my disorganization that we’ve talked about, and my creative process. Without their tolerance, I would have accomplished nothing, so I’m very grateful to them as well. [ Laughs ]

And with regard to the later years of my life, my wife, Arlene Harris, is an extraordinary role model for me. She’s much more organized than I am. She’s a brilliant technologist, never having gotten any formal technological education. If you don’t mention Arlene in that context, you have not talked about what my whole life is all about!

The fact that I have friends with whom I can hold a discussion like you and I are having now is a crucial part of my life.

If I were sitting here isolated, not being able to hear anything, I would be a very boring person. But I hope I’m not boring you!

Petra Kelly: Not at all! This drive to connect people to not waste human potential, or it sounds like to me, their experiences and expertise as people get older—to connect them, and that they still have immense value in their experience and expertise to contribute to innovation, development, discussion, society—that’s an interesting through-line I’m picking up from your lifetime of various technological developments, not just the cell phone. 

Thank you for a fascinating discussion! There’s no doubt you have a community of people who want to be part of celebrating this achievement. There are obviously quite a few demands on your time, so I really, really appreciate all the time that you’ve spent with me.

[ Cell phone call from Arlene Harris ]

Marty Cooper: Forgive me for letting Arlene be a higher priority than you are. But she’s higher priority than anybody!

Petra Kelly: The first lady of cellular technology! You’ve said how important it is to have somebody like her in your life who challenges you and keeps your brain moving and thinking about solutions.

Marty Cooper: It does. It does. Great fun talking to you, Petra.

Petra Kelly: Wonderful talking with you, and I hope, if we don’t talk again before the ceremony, that it goes wonderfully well. We’re all so excited for you!

Marty Cooper: Thank you so much. Yeah, I’m sure that it will. Nice to meet you, Petra.