American engineersMartin CooperYRaymond S. Tomlinsonhave been awarded the 2009 Prince of Asturias Award for Scientific and Technical Research. The candidacy, proposed by Vinton Cerf, is a recognition of two lines of research, the mobile phone and email, which have revolutionized the way thousands of people communicate of millions of people around the world.
The Jury for this award has been chaired by Enrique Moreno and also made up of José Luis Álvarez Margaride, Juan Luis Arsuaga, Juan Ignacio Cirac, Pedro Miguel Echenique, Juliana Fariña González, Antonio Fernández-Rañada, Luis Fernández-Vega Sanz, Vicente Gotor, Santiago Grisolía, María del Carmen Maroto Vela, Petra Mateos-Aparicios, Amador Menéndez Velázquez, Rafael Nájera Morrondo, César Nombela Cano, Fernando Ortíz Maslloréns, Ana Pastor, Miguel Ángel Pesquera, Eduardo Punset, José Ramón Quirós García, Julio R. Villanueva, Guillermo Suárez Fernández and José Antonio Martínez-Álvarez (secretary).
Martin Cooper was born in Chicago (Illinois, USA) in 1928 and graduated in Electrical Engineering in 1950. A pioneer in the wireless communication industry, Cooper invented in 1973 thefirst portable mobile phoneand he also supervised the ten years of work that were necessary to bring the product to market. During the almost three decades that he worked for the Motorola company, he developed new products that generated a significant volume of business. After leaving the company, he co-founded the Cellular Business Systems company, which soon dominated the mobile phone market. In 1992, he achieved similar success at the helm of ArrayComm, a company of which he is CEO and with which he has developed the smart antenna system, another great revolution in the world of wireless communications, with applications not only in mobile telephony. but also in the use of long-range wireless Internet. It has collaborated with the United States Government to locate new radio frequency spectra and has formulated theSpectral Efficiency Law, also known as Cooper’s Law, which determines that the maximum number of voice conversations or data transactions that can circulate in an area of the radio spectrum doubles every 30 months.
Raymond Samuel TomlinsonHe was born in Amsterdam (New York) in 1941. He studied at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in his hometown, where he participated in an IBM company program. He graduated in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer in 1963 and continued his training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 1967 he joined the Bolt Beranek y Newman technology company -now BBN Technologies-, in which he helped develop the TENEX operating system, which included ARPANet and TELNET. In 1971 he developed theARPANet’s first email applicationby successfully combining the SNDMSG and CPYNET programs to send messages between computers. He chose the symbol of theat signto distinguish local from global mails in the message address. Soon after, the at sign became the digital icon it is today.
Tomlinson’s initial program was a revolution, since it broke the initial barriers for the future development of email, which quickly became one of the most used applications on the Internet and due to its immediacy and low cost, it has been able to adapt to the demands communicative of developed societies.
