Unless you work in the telecoms industry, you are unlikely to have heard of Marty Cooper. He is hardly a household name. But his influence has been felt across the world, because he is the engineer who took the cellular technology used in the earphones of the 1970s and decided that phones ought to be small enough to be portable. His determination led to the first prototype, in 1973, and then to the first commercial mobile phone in 1983. "Marty is the most influential person no one has ever heard of," says Robert McDowell, a commissioner with the Federal Communications Commission, America's telecoms regulator.rnThe son of Ukrainian immigrants, Mr Cooper spent much of his youth in Depression-era Chicago. He says he never went hungry, but his parents made only a modest living selling merchandise door-to-door, on instalment plans. To finance his education at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Mr Cooper joined the Reserve Officers' Training Corps, and ended up on a navy destroyer, blowing up railway tracks along the North Korean coast during the Korean war.
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