He pioneered the cellphone. It changed how people around the world talk to each other — and don’t

DEL MAR, Calif. (AP) — Dick Tracy got an atom-powered two-way wrist radio in 1946. Marty Cooper never forgot it.

The Chicago boy became a star engineer who ran Motorola’s research and development arm when the hometown telecommunications titan was locked in a 1970s corporate battle to invent the portable phone. Cooper rejected AT&T’s wager on the car phone, betting that America wanted to feel like Dick Tracy, armed with “a device that was an extension of you, that made you reachable everywhere.”

Fifty-two years ago, Cooper declared victory in a call from a Manhattan sidewalk to the head of AT&T’s rival program. His four-pound DynaTAC 8000X has evolved into a global population of billions of smartphones weighing mere ounces apiece. Some 4.6 billion people — nearly 60% of the world — have mobile internet, according to a global association of mobile network operators.

The tiny computers that we carry by the billions are becoming massive, interlinked networks of processors that perform trillions of calculations per second – the computing power that artificial intelligence needs. The simple landlines once used to call friends or family have evolved into omnipresent glossy screens that never leave our sight and flood our brain with hours of data daily, deluging us with endless messages, emails, videos and a soundtrack that many play constantly to block the outside world.

From his home in Del Mar, California, the inventor of the mobile phone, now 96, watches all of this. Of one thing Cooper is certain: The revolution has really just begun.

Now, the winner of the 2024 National Medal of Technology and Innovation — the United States’ highest honor for technological achievement – is focused on the cellphone’s imminent transition to a thinking mobile computer fueled by human calories to avoid dependence on batteries. Our new parts will run constant tests on our bodies and feed our doctors real-time results, Cooper predicts.

Human behavior is already adapting to smartphones, some observers say, using them as tools that allow overwhelmed minds to focus on quality communication.

The phone conversation has become the way to communicate the most intimate of social ties, says Claude Fischer, a sociology professor at the University of California, Berkeley and author of “America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940.”

For almost everyone, the straight up phone call has become an intrusion. Now everything needs to be pre-advised with a message.

“There seems to be a sense that the phone call is for heart-to-heart,” Fischer says.

And this from a 20-year-old corroborates that: “The only person I call on a day-to-day basis is my cousin,” says Ayesha Iqbal, a psychology student at Suffolk County Community College. “I primarily text everyone else.”

When she was a girl, Karen Wilson’s family shared a party line with other phone customers outside Buffalo, New York, and had to wait to use the phone if someone else was on. Wilson, 79, shocked her granddaughter by telling her about the party line when the girl got a cellphone as a teenager.

“What did you do if you didn’t wait?’” the girl asked. Responded her grandmother: “`You went down to their house and you yelled, ‘Hey, Mary, can you come out?’”

Many worry about the changes exerted by our newly interconnected, highly stimulated world.

We increasingly buy online and get products delivered without the possibility of serendipity. There are fewer opportunities to greet a neighbor or store employee and find out something unexpected, to make a friend, to fall in love. People are working more efficiently as they drown.

“There’s no barrier to the number of people who can be reaching out to you at the same time and it’s just overwhelming,” says Kristen Burks, an associate circuit judge in Macon, Missouri.

Most importantly, sociologists, psychologists and teachers say, near-constant phone-driven screen time is cutting into kids’ ability to learn and socialize. A growing movement is pushing back against cellphones’ intrusion into children’s daily lives.

Seven states have signed — and twenty states have introduced — statewide bell-to-bell phone bans in schools. Additional states have moved to prohibit them during teaching time.

The mobile advantage is coming to rich countries faster than poor ones.

Adjusting to life in Russia when Nnaemeka Agbo moved there from Nigeria in 2023 was tough, he says, but one thing kept him going; WhatsApp calls with family.

In a country that has one of the world’s highest poverty and hunger levels despite being Africa’s top oil producer, Agbo’s experience mirrored that of many young people in forced to choose between remaining at home with family and taking a chance at a better life elsewhere.

For many, phone calls blur distance with comfort.

“No matter how busy my schedule is, I must call my people every weekend, even if that’s the only call I have to make,” Agbo says.

In Africa, where only 37% of the population had internet access in 2023, according to the International Telecommunication Union, regular mobile calls are the only option many have.

Tabane Cissé, who moved from Senegal to Spain in 2023, makes phone calls about investing Spanish earnings at home. Otherwise, it’s all texts, or voice notes, with one exception.

His mother doesn’t read or write, but when he calls “it’s as if I was standing next to her,” Cissé says. “It brings back memories — such pleasure.”

He couldn’t do it without the cell phone. And half a world away, that suits Marty Cooper just fine.

“There are more cell phones in the world today than there are people,” Cooper says. “Your life can be made infinitely more efficient just by virtue of being connected with everybody else in the world. But I have to tell you that this is only the beginning.”

Weissenstein contributed from New York and Asadu from Lagos, Nigeria. Aroun R. Deen in New York, Heather Hollingsworth in Kansas City, Missouri, Renata Brito in Barcelona, Spain and Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York also contributed.

FILE - Sarasvati Devi talks to her mother in Myanmar via video call as Ranjan, her brother, holds the phone, outside a camp for Hindu refugees near Kutupalong, Bangladesh, Sept. 26, 2017. (AP Photo/Dar Yasin, File)

A woman talks on her mobile phone in downtown Nairobi, Kenya, Sept. 13, 2025. (AP Photo/Andrew Kasuku)

FILE - Nolan Young, 3, front, looks at a smartphone while his brother Jameson, right, 4, looks at a tablet in their home in Boston, Jan. 27, 2014. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

Martin Cooper, who led the team that built the first mobile cellphone, sits behind a prototype of that phone at his home, April 4, 2025, in San Diego. (AP Photo/Gregory Bull)

FILE - Children from Yazidi families, displaced by Islamic State group militants, look at a smartphone in a partially constructed building in Dohuk, northern Iraq, Dec. 10, 2014. (AP Photo/Seivan Selim, File)

The U.S. government admitted Wednesday that the actions of an air traffic controller and Army helicopter pilot played a role in causing the collision last January between an airliner and a Black Hawk near the nation's capital, killing 67 people.

It was the deadliest crash on American soil in more than two decades.

The official response to the first lawsuit filed by one of the victims’ families said that the government is liable in the crash partly because the air traffic controller violated procedures about when to rely on pilots to maintain visual separation that night. Plus, the filing said, the Army helicopter pilots' “failure to maintain vigilance so as to see and avoid” the airline jet makes the government liable.

But the filing suggested that others, including the pilots of the jet and the airlines, may also have played a role. The lawsuit also blamed American Airlines and its regional partner, PSA Airlines, for roles in the crash, but those airlines have filed motions to dismiss.

And the government denied that any air traffic controllers or officials at the Federal Aviation Administration or Army were negligent.

At least 28 bodies were pulled from the icy waters of the Potomac River after the helicopter collided with the American Airlines regional jet while it was landing at Ronald Reagan National Airport in northern Virginia, just across the river from Washington, D.C., officials said. The plane carried 60 passengers and four crew members, and three soldiers were aboard the helicopter.

Robert Clifford, one of the attorneys for the family of victim Casey Crafton, said the government admitted “the Army’s responsibility for the needless loss of life” and the FAA’s failure to follow air traffic control procedures while “rightfully” acknowledging others –- American Airlines and PSA Airlines -– also contributed to the deaths.

The families of the victims “remain deeply saddened and anchored in the grief caused by this tragic loss of life,” he said.

The government's lawyers said in the filing that “the United States admits that it owed a duty of care to plaintiffs, which it breached, thereby proximately causing the tragic accident.”

An American spokesman declined to comment on the filing, but in the airline's motion to dismiss, American said "plaintiffs’ proper legal recourse is not against American. It is against the United States government ... The Court should therefore dismiss American from this lawsuit.” The airline said that since the crash it has focused on supporting the families of the victims.

The National Transportation Safety Board will release its report on the cause of the crash early next year, but investigators have already highlighted a number of factors that contributed, including the helicopter flying 78 feet higher (24 meters) than the 200-foot (61-meter) limit on a route that allowed only scant separation between planes landing on Reagan's secondary runway and helicopters passing below. Plus, the NTSB said, the FAA failed to recognize the dangers around the busy airport even after 85 near misses in the three years before the crash.

The government admitted in its filing that the United States “was on notice of certain near-miss events between its Army-operated Black Hawk helicopters and aircraft traffic transiting in and around helicopter routes 1 and 4” around Washington.

Before the collision, the controller twice asked the helicopter pilots whether they had the jet in sight, and the pilots said they did and asked for visual separation approval so they could use their own eyes to maintain distance. FAA officials acknowledged at the NTSB’s investigative hearings that the controllers at Reagan had become overly reliant on the use of visual separation. That’s a practice the agency has since ended.

Witnesses told the NTSB that they have serious questions about how well the helicopter crew could spot the plane while wearing night vision goggles and whether the pilots were even looking in the right spot.

Investigators have said the helicopter pilots might not have realized how high they were because the barometric altimeter they were relying on was reading 80 to 100 feet (24 to 30 meters) lower than the altitude registered by the flight data recorder.

The crash victims included a group of elite young figure skaters, their parents and coaches who had just attended a competition in Wichita, Kansas, and four union steamfitters from the Washington area.

.

FILE - Attorney Bob Clifford speaks during a news conference regarding the Jan. 29, 2025, mid-air collision between American Eagle flight 5342 and a U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopter, at the National Press Club, Sept. 24, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr., File)

FILE - National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy speaks during the NTSB fact-finding hearing on the DCA midair collision accident, at the National Transportation and Safety Board boardroom, July 30, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rod Lamkey, Jr., File)