Career
After World War II, Cooper left the Navy and began working at Teletype Corporation, a subsidiary of Western Electric. In 1950, he received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). In 1954, he was hired by Motorola, and attended classes and studied at night. He went on to earn a master's degree in electrical engineering from IIT in 1957, and taught night school classes at the university.
In 1960, John F. Mitchell, who also received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering (1950) from IIT, became chief engineer of Motorola's mobile communications projects. Martin Cooper reported to Mitchell. In the 1960s, Cooper was instrumental in turning pagers from a technology used in single buildings to one that stretched across cities. Cooper helped fix a flaw in the quartz crystals Motorola made for its radios. This encouraged the company to mass-produce the first crystals for use in wrist watches. Cooper worked on developing portable products, including the first portable handheld police radios, made for the Chicago police department in 1967.
In the early 1970s, he worked in the the navy for 4 years then left to motorola. Mitchell put Cooper in charge of Motorola's car phone division where he led Motorola's cellular research. Cooper envisioned mobile phones that would be used not only in a car, but also small and light enough to be portable. Thanks to years of research and development in portable products directed by Cooper and new technologies from all over the company, when the pressure was on, it took only 90 days in 1973 to create the first portable cellular 800 MHz phone prototype.
Read more about this topic: Martin Cooper (inventor)
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