Cell phone inventor saves friend - with his phone - at Vail
- Details
- Created on Wednesday, 09 March 2011 17:16
- Written by Nathan
Special to the Vail Daily
By SCOTT N. MILLER, VAIL DAILY
VAIL — Martin Cooper always expected everyone would have a cell phone one day. But he never imagined he'd use one to save a friend.
Cooper, now 82, is an avid skier — he owns a unit at the Liftside condos and put in more than 40 days on the mountain last season. But in industry circles, he's also known as the father of the cell phone.
After years of working for Motorola on portable devices from pagers to police radios, Cooper led a team that created the first cell phone in just 90 days in 1973. He was the first person to make a cell phone call in public, in that year, and his name is on the original patent.
A couple of weeks ago, Cooper took Masami Yamamoto, a friend and business associate, for his first runs at Vail. It didn't go well.
“We got off the first lift, I skied about 50 yards away and waited for him. He never showed up,” Cooper wrote in a story about the event he sent to the Vail Daily. “After searching everywhere I could, I headed home to get his cell phone number. When we finally connected by cell phone, I discovered that he had skied off the side of a run that was a sheer cliff that dropped 10 feet to a narrow ledge and then another several hundred feet of steep descent into a wooded area.
“Fortunately for him, his leg caught onto the rope that marked the edge of the run. He was hanging upside down, still wearing his skis and unable to remove them. He cried out for help to draw the attention of the passing skiers but, since the lifts had closed sometime earlier at 4 p.m. there was little traffic on the trail and he was not heard.”
Over the next 90 minutes or so, Cooper and Yamamoto exchanged several calls, with several more placed to the Vail Dispatch Center, often juggling two phones at once.
“I couldn't give intelligent information,” Yamamoto said. “Speaking English upside-down is very difficult!”
The Vail Ski Patrol finally found Yamamoto a bit after 5 p.m. He was hoisted back off the ledge, then taken to Vail Valley Medical Center. Two days later, he was on a flight back to his home in California.
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