Martin Cooper net worth
What is Martin Cooper’s Net Worth?
Martin “Marty” Cooper is an American inventor with a net worth of $600 million. Cooper will always be remembered as the man who invented the cell phone. Known as the “Father of Handheld Cell Phones,” he developed the first cellular portable handheld police radio system in 1967 and designed the first portable cell phone for Motorola. On April 3, 1973, Martin became the first person to call a cell phone in public, and that call was answered by AT&T’s Joel S. Engel.
Cooper holds 11 patents and is an innovator in radio spectrum management. In 1986, Martin and his wife Arlene Harris co-founded Dyna LLC, which “supports insightful, innovative, relevant technology solutions that benefit society”, both Wireless Hall of Fame and Consumer Technology luminaries members of the church. Cooper’s 2021 book, Cut the Power: How Cell Phones Changed Humanity.
early life
Martin Cooper was born on December 26, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. His parents, Arthur and Mary, were Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. Martin attended the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), and after graduating in 1950, he joined the U.S. Navy Reserve and served as a submarine officer during the Korean War. Cooper later returned to IIT, where he obtained a master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1957. He received an honorary doctorate from the school in 2004 and is hosting a virtual celebration in 2021 in honor of “mobile phone creator, Life Trustee and friend Martin “Marty” Cooper.”
Profession
After working at the Teletype Corporation in Chicago, Cooper worked at Motorola in Schaumburg, Illinois in 1954. As a senior development engineer in the company’s Mobile Devices Group, Martin developed the first portable handheld police radio, which was used in Chicago in 1967, when he became the head of the police department. He later became the head of the Communications Systems Division, where he came up with the idea for the first portable cell phone and led the team that made the idea a reality until 1973. Cooper, who has said that Dick Tracy’s wrist radio was the inspiration for the first cell phone, believed the device should be “something that represents an individual, so you can assign numbers; not to a place, not to a table , not for a home, but for a person.” Motorola spent $100 million on the concept from 1973 to 1993, and Martin’s team took less than 90 days to design and assemble the DynaTAC in early 1973 8000x. Over the next decade, the concept was tweaked several times, and the final product came to market at half the 2.5-pound weight of the original DynaTAC 8000x. Popular Science featured DynaTAC on the cover of its July 1973 issue. During Cooper’s 29 years at Motorola, he led teams that created cluster mobile radios, liquid crystal displays, oscillators, piezoelectric elements, and more, and served as the company’s director of research and development and vice president.
In 1986, Martin and his wife Arlene Harris founded Dyna LLC, which was originally the home of Cellular Pay Phone, Inc., Accessible Wireless, Subscriber Computing Inc. and SOS Wireless Communications. In 2017, Dyna LLC’s company, GreatCall, Inc., was acquired by GTCR, which sold it to Best Buy the following year for $800 million. Cooper co-founded Arraycomm in 1992; the company develops wireless communications software and is best known for its smart antenna technology. Martin was CEO of Arraycomm from 1992 to 2002 and a board member of Energous, a wireless charging technology company, from 2015 to 2019. He has also served on various government advisory committees, such as the US Department of Commerce’s Spectrum Management Advisory Committee and the FCC Technical Advisory Committee. Martin is responsible for the Spectrum Capacity Law (also known as Cooper’s Law), which states that “since Guglielmo Marconi commercialized radio communications around 1900, the capacity of the available radio spectrum to carry information has doubled every 30 months.”
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personal life
In 1991, Martin married Arlene Harris, a “true wireless-born” family owner of Industrial Communication Systems. According to Cooper’s official website, he has two children as well as four grandchildren and a great-grandchild.
Awards and Honors
Cooper was awarded the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (IEEE) Centennial Medal and Fellow in 1984. He received the Wharton Infosys Business Transformation Award in 1995, followed by the Radio Club of America Fred Link Award in 1996. In 2000, Martin was inducted into the RCR Wireless News Hall of Fame and was named one of the Top 10 Entrepreneurs of the Year by Red Herring Magazine. In 2002, he received the George Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Award and the Wireless System Design Industry Leadership Award from the American Computer Museum. Martin received the CITA Emerging Technology Award in 2006 and the Global Spec Great Moments Engineering Award in 2007.
In 2008, the Wireless History Foundation named Martin one of the most outstanding wireless innovators of all time in the United States and received the CE Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame Award. Cooper has also received the Prince of Asturias Award (2009), the ABC Lifetime Achievement Award (2010), the Webby Award for Lifetime Achievement (2011), the Washington Institute of Engineers Washington Award (2012), the United States National Academy of Engineering Charles Stark Award Draper Award (2013) and Marconi Award (2013). He was nominated for the Mikhail Gorbachev: The Man Who Changed the World Award in 2011 and received an honorary doctorate from Hasselt University in 2013.
