He pioneered the cellphone, changing how people connect — and disconnect — globally

Del Mar, California – Dick Tracy obtained a bidirectional wrist radio supplied with atom in 1946. Marty Cooper never forgot it.

Chicago’s boy has become a star engineer who directed Motorola’s research and development arm when the Home City Titan was locked in a 1970 -year -old business battle to invent the mobile phone. Cooper rejected at&T is betting on the phone of the car, betting that America wanted to feel like Dick Tracy, armed with a “device which was an extension of you, which made you accessible everywhere.”

Fifty-two years ago, Cooper declared the victory in a call of a Manhattan sidewalk at the head of&Rival program of T. Its Dynama 8000x of four pounds has become a world population of billions of smartphones weighing a few ounces each. According to a global association of mobile network operators, some 4.6 billion people – almost 60% of the world – have a mobile internet.

The tiny computers that we carry by billions become massive and interconnected networks of processors which make billions of calculations per second – the computing power whose artificial intelligence needs. The simple armed lines used formerly used to call friends or family have become omnipresent brilliant screens that never leave our sight and flood our brain with hours of data per day, hitting us with messages, emails, videos and a soundtrack that are constantly playing to block the outside world.

From his home in Del Mar, California, the inventor of the mobile phone, now 96, looks at all of this. One thing, Cooper is certain: the revolution has just started.

Now, the winner of the national technology and innovation medal of 2024 – the highest distinction in the United States for technological success – focuses on the imminent transition from mobile phone to a mobile computer thinking fueled by human calories to avoid dependence on batteries. Our new parts will carry out constant tests on our body and will feed the real -time results of our doctors, predicts Cooper.

“This will allow people to anticipate diseases before they occur,” said Cooper. “People will die from old age and accidents, but they will not die from illness. It is a revolution in medicine. ”

Human behavior already adapts to smartphones, according to some observers, using them as tools that allow outdated minds to focus on quality communication.

The telephone conversation has become the means to communicate the most intimate social ties, explains Claude Fischer, professor of sociology at the University of California in Berkeley and author of “America Calling: A Social History of the telephone until 1940”.

For almost everyone, the direct telephone call has become an intrusion. Now everything must be preceded by a message. “It seems that the phone call is for the heart to heart and not only for the exchange of information,” explains Fischer.

And this of a 20 -year -old young man corroborates that: “The only person I call on a daily basis is my cousin”, explains Ayesha Iqbal, student in psychology at Suffolk County Community. “I mainly text will text.”

The child’s education student Katheryn Ruiz, 19, agrees, saying that “texts are used for nothing substantial, as nothing personal”.

Sometimes the roles are reversed, however. Diana Cunningham, sixty-eight, from Overbrook, Kansas, Pop. 1005, uses a group text to stay in touch with your children and grandchildren. Her 18-year-old granddaughter, Bryndal Hoover, a senior at Lawrence high school nearby, says she prefers voice calls to send SMS because I can understand: “Oh, how should I do a conversation?” “”

When she was a girl, Karen Wilson’s family shared a party line with other phone customers outside Buffalo, New York. Wilson, 79, shocked his granddaughter by talking to her about the party line when the girl obtained a mobile phone in adolescence.

“What did you do if you didn’t wait?” “Asked the girl. Replied to her grandmother:” “You went down to their homes and you shouted:” Hey, Mary, can you go out? “”

Many are concerned about the changes exercised by our newly interconnected and very stimulated world.

We buy more and more online and obtain products delivered without the possibility of serendipity. There are fewer opportunities to greet a neighbor or store an employee and discover something unexpected, to make a friend, to fall in love. People work more effectively when they drown.

“There is no barrier to the number of people who can contact you at the same time and it’s just overwhelming,” explains Kristen Burks, circuit judge associated with Macon, Missouri.

Most importantly, sociologists, psychologists and teachers say that the almost constant telephone time reduced reduces the ability of children to learn and socialize. An increasing movement repels the intrusion of mobile phones in the daily life of children.

“At the turn of the millennium, technological companies based on the west coast of the United States have created a set of products that change the world,” writes the social psychologist at New York University, Jonathan Haidt, in “The Axice Generation”, which has been on the New York Times best-sellers list for a year.

“By creating an addictive content fire hose that entered the eyes and ears of children, and by moving the physical game and socializing in person, these companies have recable and changed human development on an almost unimaginable scale,” he writes.

Seven states have signed – and twenty states have introduced – state -scale bell -scale telephone prohibitions in schools. Additional states have decided to ban them during teaching time.

This is not going well with the inventor of the smartphone, who says that there are better solutions than regulation. “Adaptation to disruptive technologies requires disruptive solutions,” wrote Cooper de Del Mar. “Wouldn’t it be better for teachers to integrate the mobile phone that gives access to all the information in the world?”

This advantage arrives in rich countries faster than the poor.

The first time that Nnaemeka Agbo had to leave her family in Nigeria for an extended period, life returned it to Russia for studies, like many other young Nigerians desperate to despair of moving to seek better opportunities.

Adapting to life in Russia when he moved there in 2023 was difficult, he said, but one thing made him move forward; WhatsApp calls with the family. “One thing that kept me healthy was to call at home every time, and it made me feel closer to my people,” said the 31 -year -old.

In a country that has one of the highest levels of poverty and world hunger, although it is the best oil producer in Africa, Agbo’s experience reflects many young people in Nigeria increasingly forced to choose between family home or aim for a better life elsewhere. According to a Gallup survey published in October of last year.

For many, telephone calls blur the distance and offer comfort.

“No matter how much my schedule is busy, I have to call my people every weekend, even if it is the only call I have to make,” explains Agbo.

In Africa, where only 37% of the population had internet access in 2023, according to the International Telecommunications Syndicate, regular mobile calls are the only option that many have. In the state of Zamfara in northern Nigeria, Abdulmalik Saidu says that the mobile connectivity rate is so low that “sometimes we remain for weeks without network”.

When Shamsu Deen-Cole, 19, flew from Sierra Leone to the United States to study international relations in 1971, spending his parents in Sierra Leone took days, starting by telling his parents when to expect the call. Calls would cost about $ 150 for less than 10 minutes. “There was no time for additional or complementary conferences, because everything would add up in cost,” recalls Deen-Cole, 73.

Tabane Cissé, who moved from Senegal to Spain in 2023, made telephone calls on the investment of Spanish income at home. Otherwise, these are all texts or vocal notes, with one exception.

His mother does not read or write, but when he calls “it’s as if I was standing next to her,” says Cissé. “It brings back memories – such pleasure.”

He couldn’t do it without the mobile phone. And half a world is very suitable for Marty Cooper.

“There are more mobile phones in the world today than people,” says Cooper. “Your life can be made infinitely more effective just due to being connected with everyone in the world. But I must tell you that this is only the beginning.”

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Weissenstein contributed from New York and Asudu from Lagos, Nigeria. Aroun R. Deen in New York, Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Missouri, Renata Brito in Barcelona, ​​Spain and Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York also contributed.