Cutting the Cord

The Cell Phone has Transformed Humanity

Martin Cooper

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781948122740
• eBook ISBN: 9780795353024
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Science & Technology Biographies
• Index: Business

One of Time Magazine's Top 100 Inventors in History shares an insider's story of the cellphone, how it changed the world—and a view of where it's headed.
 
While at Motorola in the 1970s, wireless communications pioneer Martin Cooper invented the first handheld mobile phone. But the cellphone as we know it today almost didn't happen. Now, in Cutting the Cord, Cooper takes readers inside the stunning breakthroughs, devastating failures, and political battles in the quest to revolutionize—and control—how people communicate. It's a dramatic tale involving brilliant engineers, government regulators, lobbyists, police, quartz crystals, and a horse.
 
Industry skirmishes sparked a political war in Washington to prevent a monopolistic company from dominating telecommunications. The drama culminated in the first-ever public call made on a handheld, portable telephone—by Cooper himself.
 
The story of the cell phone has much to teach about innovation, strategy, and management. But the story of wireless communications is far from finished. This book also relates Cooper's vision of the future. From the way we work and the way children learn to the ways we approach medicine and healthcare, advances in the cellphone will continue to reshape our world for the better.

PART I

Out of the Ditch

Immigrants and Entrepreneurs

In 1919, amid the Ukrainian War of Independence and the Russian Civil War, Cossacks on horseback galloped through the village of Pavoloch in Ukraine killing townspeople at random. A fourteen-year-old girl dived into a ditch, narrowly avoiding the slice of a Cossack’s saber.

This was merely an advance party: more Cossacks were on the way, and they would plunder the town, killing, raping, and wounding as they went. Nearly 90 percent of Pavoloch was Jewish, and it would be the site of one of the periodic but horrific pogroms aimed at Jews in Ukraine in those years.

The girl ran home to warn her family. Her father, Nathan Bassovsky, made an immediate decision. Pogroms had devastated other Jewish towns the previous year, nearly wiping them out—he would not let his wife and six children fall victim to another one. Before more Cossacks could arrive, Bassovsky organized and financed a wagon train and invited his neighbors and friends to join in an escape. Those who accepted loaded everything they could onto horse-drawn wagons and left.

It took months for the caravan to cross Europe. Partway, they sold the horses and wagons and traveled by train to Antwerp, Belgium. They were not alone. The Belgians had created a facility where thousands of pogrom victims could bathe, launder their clothes, and leave Europe.

The Bassovsky family.

Nathan, with his eldest son, Morris, departed ahead of the rest of the family for Canada, settling in Winnipeg among others who were welcomed there by organizations responding to the horror in Europe. In 1921, the fourteen-year-old girl, Mindel Bassovsky, and her two sisters, Birdie and Rose, and the remaining brothers, Max and Frank, boarded the SS Caronia bound for Halifax. The five children were among millions of people who fled Europe for Canada and other countries.

The Canadian National Railroad document shows that Mindel arrived in Canada on August 13, 1921. She declared that she had the minimum amount of fifty dollars required for entry and that she was on her way to join her father in Winnipeg. On the line that asked, “Nearest relative in country from which you came,” she wrote, “nobody.” All Mindel’s immediate family had abandoned Ukraine, and she knew what fate faced the Jews who remained there.

Mindel Bassovsky was my mother; her perseverance and sharpness were impressed upon me at an early age. By the mid-1920s, Mindel had met and married my father, Osher Kuperman, later Arthur Cooper, who had also arrived in Canada in 1921 on the SS Antonia, traveling from Skvyra, Ukraine. On his Canadian entry card, he wrote that he was “joining cousins” in Canada. My mother also changed her name, to Mary.

Entry document for Mindel Bassovsky into Canada, 1921.

The SS Antonia. The ship my father traveled on from Antwerp to Halifax in 1921.

Sometime in the late 1920s, my parents emigrated again, this time to Chicago. I was born there in 1928. Not long after that, they returned to Winnipeg, and my brother was born there in 1932.

Their first attempt to become financially independent was a laundry business in Chicago, which they had the opportunity to purchase. The business was expensive, so my parents wanted to be sure it was a good investment. The owners let them work at the laundry for a one-week trial period. Business was booming; my parents turned over their savings and bought the laundry.

Sadly, it was a Potemkin village, a sales charade meant to impress, and deceive, my parents. The once steady stream of customers evaporated pretty much the morning my parents opened for business. Evidently, the previous owners had organized their large and extended family to pose as customers during the trial week. That prompted my parents to return to Winnipeg, packing up their Chicago belongings—including their young son.

In Winnipeg, my parents owned and operated a modest grocery store near Main Street at Redwood and Charles. It was in a single-story wood building, and we lived in the rooms behind the store. We had a small yard in the back with a single tree, where I built a “tree house” when I was six or seven—just a few wooden boards nailed into the branches.

The store itself was a single room lined with shelves, with more freestanding shelves in the center. The most memorable thing for me was the corn flakes. I remember boxes of them stacked on the high shelves. Too high and too close, though, to the stovepipe along the ceiling that took out fire exhaust from the small, coal-fired stove that heated the store. No one was hurt when the inevitable fire broke out—unless you count the extended period during which we all ate lightly blackened corn flakes for breakfast. The store, luckily, did not burn down.

Unsurprisingly, many of my childhood memories of Winnipeg involve ice and snow. We skated on the streets when they became sheets of ice during the winter. Our neighbors across the street flooded their backyard to create an ice rink that all the neighborhood kids used well into the spring. Milkmen would convert their horse-drawn delivery wagons into sleighs. Pavement was a rare sight until the big spring melt.

Around 1937, after the grocery store fire, our family moved to Fort William, Ontario (which later became part of Thunder Bay). There, my parents started another grocery store. I was now a voracious reader and a nerd, the last to be chosen when teams were picked for schoolyard games. After a year or so in Fort William, with the grocery store failing, we found ourselves back in Winnipeg, but just for a short time. My parents were planning a move back to Chicago.

In 1937, my father hopped on a freight train to cross the US border illegally. I desperately wanted to join him, but that wasn’t an option. My mother and my brother, Will, and I went to Niagara, Ontario. We stayed overnight in the cheapest hotel in town and, the next morning, walked across a bridge into the United States. When the border official asked for the purpose of our visit, my mother replied, “We’re going shopping.” It took four years for us to return from that shopping trip.

My maternal grandparents.

Me (with curls!) in Winnipeg in the 1930s.

My parents and brother were “illegal” immigrants. I had been born in the United States so was a citizen. My nephew Steve, digging through old family records, found a US border entry card showing that my mother, father, and brother legally re-entered the United States in 1943. A charitable organization in Chicago assisted with the naturalization process, and they became citizens in 1945.

My folks found an inexpensive flat on the west side of Chicago that was our home for about five years. My father got a job in a luggage factory. My mother, following her entrepreneurial instinct, sought out business opportunities where she could use her sales skills productively. I still recall my embarrassment when I accompanied her as she sold corsets to chubby ladies in a rented hotel room on Michigan Avenue.

She eventually discovered the installment sales business. My mother was a dynamo, a woman incapable of walking slowly, and this job fit her perfectly. She would take a bus to a distant neighborhood and, with a throw rug under her arm, knock on one door after another, offering the rug for sale for as little as fifty cents a week. She returned each week to collect payment and always with a new household offering. Wholesalers of furniture, clothing, and household goods gave independent entrepreneurs like my mother credit to sell their products. The entrepreneurs extended credit, in turn, to their customers. If only the internet existed then, she probably would have founded Amazon, and I would have been the snotty rich kid who never had to work a day in his life.

My father later joined her in the business. The luggage factory was the first and last time he ever worked for someone else. Both of my parents were what today we call serial entrepreneurs. In fact, among my mother and her five siblings, only Rose’s husband worked for someone else—it was not overtly mentioned, but Harry was the odd man out in our family.

My mother had an irresistible personality and was superb at cold house calls; my father hated them. She would acquire new clients, and he would take on and develop the account. In his quiet way and with a healthy sense of humor, he turned out to be a successful salesman. That was how they supported our family for the rest of their working lives. They made enough to purchase cars so that they could extend their customer base to the suburbs. Their customers became almost like family members; they attended our weddings and celebrations and we attended theirs.

My father’s 1943 border entry card for the United States.

For a teenage boy, my mother’s personality could be embarrassing. She was always getting into conversations with strangers. Yet I find myself doing the same. Like her, I talk to strangers and develop friendships anywhere. I realize she must have passed along her love of people to me. Like her, I don’t know how to walk slowly. And, like her, I’ve always been selling, but in my case, I sell ideas and dreams.

Our family wasn’t wealthy, but I don’t ever remember going hungry during the Depression. My brother and I shared a bed for several years, and we even had a boarder for some time. My parents did well enough in their business ventures to afford an early television set and a new Plymouth car.

Even in my earliest memories, I had an intense interest in how things worked. I knew that, someday, I would be an engineer. As a five-year-old in Winnipeg on the cracked and uneven concrete sidewalk in front of our grocery store, I observed some boys using the sun’s rays through a magnifying glass to burn a piece of paper. I spent hours trying to replicate the experiment. Despite the use of Coke bottle bottoms and pieces of glass, I was unsuccessful even after I heated the glass with matches that I took from the store.

In the basement of our apartment on Maypole Avenue in Chicago, using money from part-time jobs, I constructed a photographic darkroom and became a pretty good photographer. I lobbied our landlord to let me install a TV antenna on the roof. He refused, having no idea what an antenna was and fearing anything modern, but I installed it anyway and he never noticed.

My fascination with how things worked drew me into a love affair with cars. These were machines I could try to understand by taking them apart and putting them back together. Like many of my childhood and teenage friends, I could tell you every detail of every car model and how they changed through the years. I didn’t get a car of my own until 1952. It was a beautiful 1949 Packard convertible, its whitewall tires a striking contrast with its gleaming black body. It wasn’t a great car. The automatic clutch never worked right, and it had awful suspension that caused the car to shudder terribly at the slightest bump in the road. But my convertible elevated my bachelorhood to heights I never envisioned.

Me with my beautiful but terribly unreliable 1949 Packard.

It was the deficiencies in cars that allowed me to learn about them. Most cars in the 1940s and 1950s were fundamentally unreliable. The greatest deficien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Image Credits
• Index