Martin Cooper

“If we don't blow ourselves up, this is going to be a really wonderful world.”

“Yes, I was the one people credit with inventing the cell phone. Now, whenever anyone gets a dropped call, they blame me.”

“The only thing I don't like is being called the 'grandfather of the cellphone' because that makes me a little older than I prefer to be.”

“Privacy is a thing of the past.”

“The optimum telephone is one that I think some day is gonna be embedded behind your ear. It's gonna have an extraordinarily powerful computer running the cell phone.”

“I'm at the doctor's office. I'm in the waiting room. And there's this guy on his cell phone, talking really loud. Does he think he owns the place? Apparently. I think this is so offensive. But you have to remember: It doesn't take a cell phone to make people rude. People were rude before there were cell phones.”

“I had an iPhone for a while, I gave that to my grandson. Kids are really caught up in that.”

“My wife has forced me to wear designer jeans, and I find... there must be two or three hundred different kinds of jeans you can wear, all of which are made out of denim and look roughly the same. People are different. They have different tastes, different bodies. Cellphones ought to be the same.”

“The technology that lets many people use the same radio channel at the same time is called smart antenna technology or adaptive array technology or interference mitigation. This technology uses computer processors to take the signals from multiple antennas at each location and sorts the various signals out so they don't interfere with each other.”

“We did envision that some day the phone would be so small that you could hang it on your ear or even have it embedded under your skin.”

“I don't want to be the oldest anything in America. Sorry about that.”

“Good technology is intuitive - the cellphone forces you to become an engineer.”

“Technology has to be invisible. Transparent. Just simple.”

“When you get involved in a startup, you have to be passionate.”

“I'm a science-fiction fan. All science fiction ends up being reality.”

“WattUp is one of those rare breakthroughs that recognizes that the so-called 'battery' problem in wireless devices is solved with a charging solution that is transparent to the user. The cell phone with a dead battery can become a relic of the past. The days of wired, mat-based and proximity charging are over.”

“The public doesn't adopt radical concepts very quickly.”

“Of course I have an iPhone and I use that, interestingly enough, mostly for my calendar because it synchronizes with my calendar. I take pictures with it and I show people pictures of my grandchildren.”

“You have to immerse yourself into a product and use it in order to really understand it and that's why I have a new cellphone every month or two.”

“We thought our vision was right, which was that someday everyone would be walking around carrying phones with them.”