Martin Cooper, Joel S. Engel, Richard H. Frenkiel, Thomas Haug, and
Yoshihisa Okumura will receive the Charles Stark Draper Prize — a $500,000
annual award given to engineers whose accomplishments have significantly
benefited society — “for their pioneering contributions to the world’s first
cellular telephone networks, systems, and standards.” The National Academy of Engineering (
NAE) will present the award in Washington, DC, on
February 19.
Cellular telephony is an exceptional technological achievement that has
enabled us to communicate from virtually any location and access a myriad of
information at the touch of a button. The device connects people, provides
security, and bridges informational gaps in modern society. Cooper, Engel,
Frenkiel, Haug, and Okumura each made substantial contributions to its
creation.
The first limited form of mobile telephone service was provided by
AT&T in 1946, and the initial ideas for cellular systems emerged at Bell
Labs a year later. A lack of channels inhibited further exploration of these
ideas until the late 1960s, when Bell Labs began planning activities for a
"high capacity" mobile telephone system. Engel and Frenkiel, with the
late Phil Porter, were the earliest engineers involved in this work. They
developed a plan for a network of low-power transmitters and receivers spread
throughout a region in small coverage areas that came to be called cells, which
allowed service to be expanded to millions of users with a limited number of
channels. This plan resulted in technical report that was filed with the U.S.
Federal Communications Commission in 1971 presenting the design for what would
become the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), the first cellular telephone
system in the U.S.
At the same time while working at Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT)
Research Laboratories, Okumura was laying the groundwork for a network system
for simultaneous cell phone use by the masses in Japan. Through the
investigation of precise propagation of radio waves in a high frequency range,
Okumura found data that provided the foundation for a mobile model that could
be used over wide areas that included urban cities, hills, and mountains. In
1979, the NTT’s network became the world’s first fully integrated commercial
cell phone system and had the most advanced electronic switching.
Shortly after the cellular network was developed, Cooper, who was
working at Motorola at the time, unveiled the first portable hand-held cellular
phone. After conducting in-depth research and filing several patents on
technologies needed for the device, Cooper and his team produced a fully
functional phone that utilized radio waves and frequency reuse to enable
mobility and operability over a wide area. In 1973, Cooper made the first
mobile telephone call on his cell phone prototype from a New York City street
to a landline phone at Bell Laboratories. The phone call was answered by Engel.
By 1960 several Nordic countries had their own local mobile systems,
however, cell phone users were not able to transfer calls between towers. From
1970 to 1982, Haug worked to develop the Nordic Mobile Telephony (NMT) system,
which provided analog service across the various countries. In 1982, inspired
by the successful Nordic example, Haug formed a research group to create a
system that would allow users to place and receive calls anywhere in the world.
By 1992 Haug and his colleagues had successfully developed the new digital
high-quality and high-security mobile communication system called Global System
for Mobile Communications (GSM), which permitted users to freely move in and
between any countries where the system was installed while setting up and
receiving calls automatically.
Cooper worked as a division manager and head of R&D for Motorola
during a 29-year tenure. After leaving Motorola in 1983, he co-founded several
business ventures including ArrayComm LLC, GreatCall Inc., and Dyna LLC, where
he now serves as president. Cooper is also a member of the Technology Advisory
Council of the FCC and serves on the U.S. Department of Commerce Spectrum
Advisory Committee. Cooper is a member of the NAE.
Joel Engel joined Bell Laboratories in 1959 where he held a number of
systems engineering and development management positions through 1983. Engel is
recognized for leading the original team of architects of the first cellular
telephone system at Bell. After Bell, he went on to become vice president at
Satellite Business Systems, which later became MCI, and then Ameritech in 1987.
In 1994 Engel received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the
highest honor for technological achievement, bestowed by the president of the
United States. He is now the president of JSE Consulting. Engel is a member of
the NAE.
Richard Frenkiel began his work on cellular systems at Bell Labs in
1966. In 1969, at a conference in Boulder, Colorado, he presented the first
public description of what would become the AMPS system, and working with
Engel, he went on to author sections of AT&T’s 1971 cellular proposal to
the FCC. Continuing with work on the development of the AMPS system in the
1970s, he invented a method for cell-splitting that greatly simplified the
logistics of cellular growth and reduced system cost by more than half. He
became head of mobile systems engineering at Bell Labs in 1977, and served on
the EIA committee that prepared the first standard for cellular operation in
the U.S. In 1983 he left cellular to become head of R&D for AT&T’s
cordless telephone business unit. Following his retirement from Bell Labs in
1993, he joined WINLAB, the Wireless Information Networks Laboratory at
Rutgers, where he teaches a course in wireless business strategy. Frenkiel
received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation with Engel in 1994 and
is a member of the NAE.
Thomas Haug joined the Swedish Board of Telecommunications in 1966,
after working with the Ericsson group in Stockholm and Westinghouse in
Baltimore, Md. In 1970 he was appointed Secretary of the joint Nordic Mobile
Telephony project for cellular communication called NMT and later became its
Chairman. From 1982 onwards he headed the team that created the GSM cellular
network and served as the chairman of the European GSM committee. He was awarded
the Gold Medal of the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in 1987, the
Philipp Reiss Medal (Germany) in 1993 and the Eduard Rhein Prize in 1997. Haug
retired in 1992, but continued to serve as a mobile telephony consultant in
developing countries.
Yoshihisa Okumura joined the NTT in 1950 where he began to study wave
propagation, non-line-of-sight propagation and mobile communication
propagation. During this time Okumura led the Mobile Radio Research Group that
formulated and developed the plan for the "High-Capacity Wide-Area
Cellular Automobile Telephone System,” which resulted in the first
high-capacity wide-area cellular automobile service in Japan. In 1975 Okumura
left NTT and started working on digital beepers for Toshiba. He then went on to
teach a masters program in the graduate school of electrical engineering at the
Kanazawa Institute of Technology. The research and data that Okumura discovered
while at NTT is known worldwide as the “Okumura Curve”.
You can read the original NAE news release
here→.
