CALLER: Martin Cooper
Inventor of the cellular telephone
LOCATION: Inside the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
PHONE: Motorola V60

I'm originally Canadian. I was born in Toronto and I lived my early years in Winnipeg. I'm at the Smithsonian Institution today; I spent the morning talking about the creation of the cellphone, which happened exactly 30 years ago.

When me and my colleagues at Motorola built the first cellular phone in 1973, it weighed 2½ pounds. This phone I'm talking on weighs a little over three ounces.

That first phone was absolutely wonderful but not very practical. We literally built it to prove a point. The concept of cellular was invented by Bell in 1945, and in the late sixties Bell decided to go ahead with it, and their version was car telephones.

Me and my colleagues didn't believe that was at all how the world ought to be. People didn't want to talk to cars, and they didn't want to talk to desks either. They want to talk to other people, and people absolutely have got to be free to be anywhere. So we wanted to build a machine to prove it.

In three months, we built what became the very first cellular phone. We put a base station up on top of a building across the street from the New York Hilton -- that base station, by the way, is still there -- I walked down the street in Manhattan with it and even those jaded New Yorkers stopped and stared, because here was a guy talking on the phone on the street.

Then I picked it up and called my competitor, Joel Engel at Bell Labs, and told him, "Guess what, Joel, I'm talking to you on a real cellular phone, walking down the street in New York."

It took 10 years for them to get through all the regulatory issues after that. I got a commercial cellphone as soon as they came on the market, even though it cost me almost $3,000 (U.S.). I always buy the latest thing that comes along. I've barely mastered the V60, and my wife's got a V70, and they've come along with one with a colour screen, so I'll have to get that.

But in 1973, the purpose was to persuade the world and the regulators and the Congress that cellular was a form of personal communications, freedom of people to be anywhere, and that it could really be usable.

This is where it all began.

In February, 1982, a small article appeared in the Living section of The Globe and Mail. "A wireless portable telephone may soon become the hottest business status symbol," it began, explaining that "high-frequency cellular radio" would allow users to carry around full-fledged telephones that "weigh less than two pounds" and cost only $6,000.

It sounded too good to be true, or perhaps too weird to be interesting, so most Canadians put aside this strange prognostication until a year later, when "cellular radio telephony" suddenly became a real-life phenomenon.

In February, 1983, while dozens of companies were jockeying for licences in Ottawa, the Alberta government quietly launched Canada's first working cellphone service for oil-field explorers. Those brave pioneers who signed up for the Aurora-400 service were given the promised status symbol: A "luggable" phone the size of a briefcase.

At the time, it hardly seemed that the whole world was about to change. Yet the cellular-radio telephone, which people now simply call "my cell" or "my mobile" or just "the phone," has changed the world more rapidly than any technology before, including the original telephone.

This past year marked a boundary: For the first time, the world contains more wireless phones than traditional wired ones. There are 1.5 billion of the former and 1.3 billion of the latter. Some countries, such as Brazil, have skipped the old "land-line" phones entirely and are providing new neighbourhoods only with mobiles.

Once a toy of the rich, they are now accessible to even the poorest people on earth -- in fact, subsistence-level farmers in developing countries are among the bigger growth markets, and the very poor have seen their lives changed more than anyone. Cellphones have altered the patterns and habits of youth, of business, of journalism, of rural life, of human communication. Quietly, and almost overnight, the cellphone has become the world's favourite means of interaction.

CALLER: David Crowe
Very early Canadian cellphone user
LOCATION: His gym in Calgary
PHONE: Samsung Colour CDMA, silver

In 1984, I started working for a company called Novatel, which meant that I got a big heavy cellphone to mount inside my 1977 Toyota. There had been phones the previous year, but only a few guys in the oil industry used them. It was an analog phone, and it weighed 10 or 11 pounds at least. It didn't have call waiting or voice mail or call display or anything like that.

It was a real novelty -- I had a son in the Boy Scouts, and I'd take the boys up to camp and they'd all want to use the phone. What they all said was, "Hey Mom, guess what I'm calling on?"

Around 1990, I stopped thinking of it as a novelty in any way, but during the 1980s there was always that sense that you had something new. Right from the beginning, I knew the benefits -- it allowed me to be in touch with my family when I was doing business.

Since those days, I've been working on getting roaming connections going so that people can move between China and Korea and Japan, say, and be able to use the same phone account. We still have a long way to go on things like that. You'd think they would have found a way to make it work, but these are the same problems we were facing 10 years ago.

Not long after Mr. Crowe got involved, a few close observers began to notice that these expensive bats of thermoplastic and silicone were having unusual effects on people. On Howe Street in Vancouver and King Street in Toronto, guys in double-breasted suits plowed through the crowd brandishing their giant phallic instruments and yelling, "Guess where I'm calling from?" They were elite. They were sexy. They were despised.

"Soon," the Washington Post prophesied, "the cellular-telephone technology now travelling in cars will fit snugly on a person's belt. A lot of people -- a media elite -- will carry their telephones with them. That means that sometime in the future, a couple strolling down a sandy beach, friends bumping into each other on the street, and a luncheon meeting with business partners will all be interrupted by a telltale ring or buzz or beep. . . . What's the etiquette of that situation?"

If this continues, the writer worried, "The word 'crowd' will lose its meaning. Crowds normally share something above and beyond the physical sharing of space. With personal technologies, a crowd is nothing more than a collection of individuals."

Around the same time, police began to complain that people in New York were having car accidents because they were busy talking on these newfangled phones. On Miami Vice.the grizzled detectives were seen coolly answering bricks of plastic the size of pasta-house pepper mills. A market emerged in fake curly cellphone aerials to mount on the back windows of less-privileged cars.

The market grew exponentially, but people were still struggling to find uses for the phones. Journalists were slower to catch on than you'd think. In Canada, the big breakthrough came with the Meech Lake Accord negotiations in 1987. This was the first time stories were broken by cellphone. Soon, the concept of a "lockup" was lost, and reporters could break stories by seconds, rather than hours or minutes.

But the 1990s marked the time of the greatest breakthroughs. Suddenly, cellphones were no longer exotic, no longer elite, no longer a status symbol or an emblem of contempt. In North America and Western Europe, they became something everybody had: In some northern European countries, cellphone penetration rates now exceed 80 per cent (that is, 8 out of 10 people have one). In South Korea, that rate exceeds 100 per cent. In other words, they have more than one phone per person.

High-school students report that cellphones have changed the laconic patterns of teen life. No longer are carefully arranged plans or scheduled events a major part of life: For the first generation to have grown up with cellphones, the devices are an instrument of constant communication and free-form wandering.

But by far the most dramatic effects have occurred in the developing world.For the poorest people on Earth, the cellphone has provided immediate and surprising benefits far greater than those we've experienced in the West. A source of convenience for us, it is a life-transforming miracle for the very poor.

CALLER: Laily Begum
Subsistence chicken farmer
LOCATION: Patira, Bangladesh
PHONE: Standard black Nokia

We have always been poor. But things have started looking better since I bought this mobile pay phone with money borrowed from Grameen Bank (a development agency). When they offered me the phone so I could make more money, I was so surprised that I could hardly trust my own ears. There was no phone in our village at all.

Hundreds of people came to look at the phone. Now, about 40 people make a call every day. Before, they had to go into Dhaka (20 kilometres away). If they make a local call, I charge 5 taka (15 cents) a minute, and if it's to another country, I look up the rate on a chart. The people can make calls for much less than it cost before. I earn 7,000 taka ($190) a month, which has allowed me to send my children to school. And people in the village respect me now.

In Bangladesh, the villagers pay for their cellphone airtime with milk, chickens, sugarcane or cash. Cellphones have transformed village life -- there are now more than 23,000 village phone ladies like Ms. Begum in remote, deeply impoverished villages. The phone ladies make, on average, around $1,000 a year, in a country whose average income is around $500.

Now six years old, the program is such a huge and surprising success that it is being copied across the developing world, in southeast Asia, in Africa, in Central America. Areas without non-profit programs like this have developed similar, de facto programs because most villages, no matter how poor, have someone willing and able to scrape together the money for a cellphone.

Surprisingly, cellphones are a very good idea in the poorest parts of the world. In these places, the population density tends to be very high, making cellphone antennas worth installing for the phone companies. Generally, these neighbourhoods have never had traditional phone lines. This is how the world is getting in touch: Not through a giant infrastructure, but through tiny networks of enterprising people with their own personal, wireless devices. It means that rural life no longer needs to be fixed to the end of a long wire.

As the cellphone has become a life-enhancing fixture for the very poor, it conversely has lost its cachet with the very wealthy and powerful. Actor Eddie Murphy recently boasted that he has no idea how to use a computer or a cellphone, acknowledging that he has other people to perform such menial tasks. Last month, when a variety of U.S. politicians announced their candidacy for leadership of the Democratic Party, TV newscasters expressed alarm at the sight of New York activist Al Sharpton actually speaking on his own phone at events. As a status symbol, the lack of a phone has become far more impressive than the presence of one.

This is where our 20-year voyage has taken us, much to everyone's surprise. Only a decade ago, the cellphone was an odd bit of unnecessary technological ornamentation that admired scorn and disgust as much as envy directed at the small group of well-off people who used it. Today, it is an indispensable and liberating couple of ounces of technology that can be bought in the variety store here, put in the hands of the very poorest people in the world over there, and carries no stigma other than that of basic human conversation.

In two decades, this most visible and obtrusive invention has rapidly faded into the background, to the point that it is no longer noticed. It has erased itself from our concern, leaving only a colourful background of conversation.
Doug Saunders is an international affairs writer with the Globe and Mail.

In the beginning

Modern mobile telephone service hardly appeared out of the blue. It was the product of decades of research and development.

1940s
A form of mobile radiophone service became available in the late 1940s, but its capacity was limited. Cities such as New York could have only 12 simultaneous callers. In 1947, in a bid to use the airwaves more efficiently, AT&T engineers decided to stretch the number of frequencies. They proposed scattering low-power transmitters throughout metropolitan areas that would "hand off" calls to each other as customers drove past. Reusing the frequencies would allow many more people on the system.

This was the birth of wireless technology, but it took 20 years to develop the sophisticated "handoff" technology required.

1970s
The technological pieces of wireless fell into place, and in April, 1973, Toronto-born Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the world's first call on a portable cellphone, edging out his rivals at Bell Laboratories, which had introduced the idea of cellular communications in 1947 with its radiophone technology for police cars). In 1977, two experimental licences were authorized in the United States -- in Chicago and the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., corridor.
In 1978, the Bahrain Telephone Co. launches a commercial cell system, followed in 1979 by a cell network in Tokyo.

1981
Europe's first cellular service appears when the Nordic Mobile Telephone System begins operating in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway.

February, 1983
North America's first true service begins when Alberta Government Telephones, now Telus, launches Aurora-400. The system employs GTE and NovAtel equipment that reuses frequencies, the defining principle of cellular, but doesn't hand off calls. This works well for rural areas needing wide coverage, but doesn't offer the capacity required in urban centres.

October, 1983
The regional Bell company Ameritech begins the first U.S. commercial cellular service in Chicago, followed by similar services in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., in December.

1985
Widespread commercial service begins in Canada, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, Austria and Ireland. Bell Canada's new cellular unit takes out an ad in The Globe and Mail extolling the virtues of the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, an "over $6,000 value" that looks much like a brick with an antenna on top.

1992
The U.S. industry hits 10 million customers.

2002
The U.S. figure tops 120 million.

Wireless Canadians

The modern mobile telephone is one of history's fastest growing consumer products. Toronto-based tech-research firm International Data Corp. (Canada) expects that more than 16 million Canadians will be using a wireless phone by the end of next year. Here is how the customer list has grown in Canada since the service's formal introduction:
1985: 6,000
1986: 42,000
1987: 94,700
1988: 194,900
1989: 317,207
1990: 525,662
1991: 771,060
1992: 1,023,810
1993: 1,321,387
1994: 1,868,882
1995: 2,584,387
1996: 3,414,711
1997: 4,207,019
1998: 5,317,247
1999: 6,883,195
2000: 8,731,220
2001: 10,678,560
2002: 11,448,747

The global picture

There are now more than 1.3 billion subscribers around the world, which means that the wireless phone has surpassed the old-fashioned "land-line" technology.

Growth trends are expected to make Asia the top region with 432 million subscribers (including China's 210 million and Japan's 83 million) by the end of the year, followed by Europe with 392 million and North America with 205 million.

China is the world's single biggest market, having surpassed the United States at 120.6 million subscribers last July.

By 2005, half of all phone calls in the world will be wireless. Although half of the planet's population has never made a phone call of any sort, the penetration rate for mobile devices is expected to reach 24 per cent that year (it was 14 per cent in 2001), with the United States hitting 81 per cent, Western Europe 82 per cent and Japan 69 per cent.

Many less-developed regions of the world are building wireless networks instead of the traditional fixed networks, because they are considerably more cost-efficient to install and maintain.

Words of advice

The mobile phone may be a wonderful device, but those who use it have developed habits that range from irritating to life-threatening. Some etiquette tips from the Canadian wireless industry:

1. When others scoff, turn it off
In public places such as a restaurant or church, remember to turn your mobile device off before you enter to avoid disturbing others by making or receiving calls.

2. Don't be a clown, turn it down
If you must keep it on, use the mute or vibrating mode. This is especially important in places where personal noise is a no-no, such as a movie theatre.

3. When in doubt, please go out
Use your common sense to decide if you should go outside, to a lobby or another room, where you won't disturb others.

4. Not everyone cares, no need to share
In small or enclosed spaces, like a bus or a meeting, not everyone wants to hear your conversation. Keep it short and be as quiet as possible.

5. Don't be a fool, respect the rules
Some places, including hospitals and airplanes, have strict rules about wireless devices. Always respect these rules, for your safety and that of others.

6. Practise safe cell
Pull to the side of the road to make or take a call. Use a headset or hands-free kit while driving so you can keep your eyes on the road and both hands on the wheel. Let it go to voice mail if road conditions or traffic make driving tough.