1. Steve Sasson -Sumber: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Sasson
His invention began in 1975 with a very broad assignment from his supervisor at
Eastman Kodak Company, Gareth A. Lloyd: Could a camera be built using solid state electronics, solid state imagers, an electronic sensor known as a charge coupled device (CCD) that gathers optical information.
Texas Instruments Inc. had designed an electronic camera in 1972 that was filmless but not digital, using instead
analog electronics. After a literature search on digital imaging came up virtually empty, Sasson drew on whatever was available: an analog-to-digital converter adapted from
Motorola Inc. components, a Kodak movie-camera
lens and the tiny CCD chips introduced by
Fairchild Semiconductor in 1973.
He set about constructing the
digital circuitry from scratch, using
oscilloscope measurements as a guide. There were no images to look at until the entire
prototype — an 8-pound (3.6-kilogram),
toaster-size contraption — was assembled. In December 1975, Sasson and his chief technician persuaded a lab assistant to pose for them. The black-and-white image, captured at a
resolution of .01
megapixels (10,000
pixels), took 23 seconds to record onto a digital cassette tape and another 23 seconds to read off a playback unit onto a television. Then it popped up on the screen.
"You could see the
silhouette of her hair," Sasson said. But her face was a blur of static. "She was less than happy with the photograph and left, saying 'You need work,"' he said. But Sasson already knew the solution: reversing a set of wires, the assistant's face was restored.
After mechanical and electrical engineering studies at the Vienna college, he was employed by Austria-Fiat, Steyr and Adler (predecessor of Audi) automobile companies before joining Daimler-Benz in 1939. Heading the pre-development department of
Daimler-Benz from 1939 to 1972, he developed e.g. the concept of the
crumple zone, the non-deformable passenger cell
[7], collapsible
steering column, safer
detachable hardtops[8] etc. and other features of
Mercedes-Benz automobiles.
Barényi died in
Böblingen, Germany. A Mercedes advertisement featuring Barényi’s image stated: “No one in the world has given more thought to car safety than this man.”
In 1960, John F. Mitchell became chief engineer of Motorola's mobile communications projects and Cooper reported to Mitchell. In the 1960s Cooper was instrumental in turning
pagers from a technology used in single buildings to one that stretched across cities. Cooper helped fix a flaw in the
quartz crystals Motorola made for its radios. This encouraged the company to mass-produce the first crystals for use in wrist watches.
[3] Cooper worked on developing portable products, including the first portable handheld police radios, made for the Chicago police department in 1967.
In the early 1970s, Mitchell put Cooper in charge of its car phone division where he led Motorola's cellular research. Cooper envisioned mobile phones that would be used not only in a car, but also small and light enough to be portable. Thanks to years of research and development in portable products directed by Cooper and new technologies from all over the company, when the pressure was on, it took only 90 days in 1973 to create the first portable cellular 800 MHz phone prototype.
[3]
In 1973, when Motorola installed a base station to handle the first public demonstration of a phone call over the cellular network, the company was trying to persuade the
Federal Communications Commission to allocate frequency space to private companies for use in the emerging technology of cellular communications. After some initial testing in Washington for the F.C.C., Cooper and Motorola took the cellular phone technology to New York to demonstrate it to reporters and the public. On April 3, 1973, standing on
Sixth Avenue in
New York City near the
New York Hilton hotel, Cooper made a phone call from a prototype Dyna-Tac handheld cellular phone before going to a press conference upstairs in the hotel. The phone connected Cooper with the base station on the roof of the
Burlington House (now the Alliance Capital Building) across the street from the hotel and into the AT&T land-line telephone system. As reporters and passers-by watched, he dialed the number and held the phone to his ear. That first call, placed to Dr.
Joel S. Engel, head of research at
Bell Labs, began a fundamental technology and communications market shift toward making phone calls to a person instead of to a place. This first phone weighed about 2.5 lb (1.1 kg).
[4][5] It was the product of Cooper's vision for personal wireless handheld telephone communications, distinct from mobile car phones. Cooper has stated in jest that watching
Captain Kirk using his
communicator on the television show
Star Trek inspired him to develop the handheld mobile phone.
[6] [7]After demonstrating the prototype cell phone to reporters, Cooper allowed some of the reporters to make phone calls to anyone of their choosing to prove that the cell phone could function as a versatile part of the telephone network.
[8]
Cooper is considered the inventor of the first handheld cellular phone and the first person to make a phone call in public on a handheld cell phone prototype. Cooper and the engineers who worked for him, and Mitchell are named on the patent "Radio telephone system" filed on October 17, 1973.
[1][9][10]
