It is difficult today to appreciate the groundbreaking work of Martin Cooper's team--his prototype appears clunky and looks more like a shoe phone--largely because of the breakneck speed of technological evolution that so quickly reshaped his cellular phone. (Cooper famously observed that within a decade of the phone's first use, he had become not the father but the grandfather of the cell phone.) When it is recalled that in 1973, when Cooper made his first call, phones still had cords and the global communications network relied entirely on land wires, the audacity of Cooper's research team can be appreciated.

The initial design called for entirely redesigning the shape of the phone itself as well as conceptualizing a computer system and the physical infrastructure to support the phone. Creating the prototype cellular phone was enormously challenging for Cooper's research team, as no model of such a device actually existed. All the technology and all the innovations were done specifically for the test model (although much of the initial work relied on patents Motorola already held in two-way radio transmitters and semiconductors).

The DynaTAC 8000X (Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) prototype was based on the premise that a caller's signal would be switched from one coverage area (cell) to another as the user moved. The earliest models of the cellular phone were little more than elaborate battery-operated walkie-talkies, or, more precisely, radios that sent and received radio frequencies and depended on base stations to relay the signal. As Cooper envisioned expanded use, however, low-powered transmitters in each cell would allow frequencies to be reused simultaneously in other nearby cells--thus eliminating the problem faced by earlier car phones of long waits for signals to be relayed. Computerized network equipment tracked the signal, and antennae transmitted the signal like a radio station. The same computerized tracking system maintained the signal's integrity amid other cell calls, those signals handed off through the network of directional antennae.

As Cooper and his team had envisioned, as cell phone use inevitably increased, the system could accommodate virtually unlimited signal transmission by making the cell regions themselves progressively smaller, thus enabling more signals but still maintaining necessary clarity.

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