Today on Something You Should Know what word in the English language has the most meanings and it's only three letters long.
Then, what is heredity, and how much are you really like your parents?
It's not like just because you look like one of your parents, you are more like them in some sort of deep way.
You inherit 50% of your genes from one parent, 50% from the other.
So genetically speaking, you're just a perfect 50-50 split between your parents.
Also, where did sneakers or tennis shoes come from?
And you'll meet the father of the modern cell phone.
He actually made the very first public cell phone call, and he has high hopes for the future.
Think about the potential of a cell phone.
The UN did a study that showed that 12 billion people in Africa moved out of severe poverty, mostly because of their cell phones.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Something You Should Know.
Fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life.
Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
We start today with an interesting question.
Which word in the English language has the most different meanings?
Unless you know it, you probably won't believe it.
It's only three letters, but it has 645 meanings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
And the word is run.
Think about it.
You can run to the store.
You can have a run in your stockings.
You can run over on your budget.
Your car can run over a nail, and if it punctures the tire, then your car won't run right.
You can run in a race, you can run up a tab, and if you're the boss, then you run the show.
And the list goes on.
One small word, lots and lots of meanings.
645 of them.
And now I must run on to the next segment.
And that is something you should know.
When you hear the word hereditary, you probably think about things like eye color or hair color or height, things like that, things you inherit from your parents or that are passed down through generations of families.
But it turns out there's a lot of misunderstanding about what is and isn't hereditary, and how much of who you are is determined by heredity versus your environment, versus your personal choice.
And science is learning so much about this, with so much more to discover in the future.
It's a fascinating subject and no one has tackled it better than Carl Zimmer.
Carl writes for the New York Times, he teaches science writing at Yale University and he's author of a really interesting and really big book called She Has Her Mother's Laugh The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity.
Hi Carl, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hi, thanks for having me.
So what is heredity?
How do you define it?
Most of us know what we mean by.
You know passing down from your parents your eye color or your hair color.
But dive in a little deeper here.
Well, heredity is a word that's been around for a long time.
I mean, the ancient Romans would talk about heredity and their word was hereditas, and it referred to the rules of by which people inherited stuff from each other.
And we still talk about inheriting money or houses or what have you.
But by the 1800s, people were thinking about other things that people inherited.
Why was it that diseases seem to run in families, for example?
So people started to look for explanations for why each generation resemble the previous generation in different ways.
And that's what led to the discovery of genetics.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that just saying like oh, it's just genes.
Is really the full answer to heredity.
Actually, that's just really kind of the starting point for understanding what heredity is and why it means so much to us.
Well, those are good questions.
What is it and why does it mean so much to us?
You know, I think we have developed an idea that if we want to understand our own identity and who we are, we have to look to the past, that somehow we can zero in on some ancestor to figure out how our lives ended up the way they are.
And you know so.
This is what drives the huge genealogy business today and the direct-to-consumer genetics testing.
I mean, we want to We want to find out, are we 27% Irish?
And can we identify our great-great-great-great-great-grandmother?
And maybe there's something like us in that person.
But you know, I would just broadly say that heredity is what the past gave the present and what the present is going to leave for the future.
How do you know, or can you know, or is it even important to know that if some relative or ancestor had some trait or some quirk or some behavior that you have, whether that's inherited or there are just so many traits and quirks and things that people have that you compare yourself to enough people you're going to have some things in common.
I think a lot of things that we single out are just There are things that lots of people have, and it just so happens that one of your many, many relatives has it in common with you.
It's a bit like astrology that way.
Yeah, you can find some coincidences that seem compelling, but I think we need to sort of look deeper.
And it is possible that you are similar to your parents, not necessarily because you share genes with them, but also because they raised you.
And you are paying very close attention to them, like it or not, and you are getting to be like them.
That's not to say that genetics don't play a role.
I mean, you know, tall people tend to have tall children and short people tend to have short children.
I mean, that's a fact.
But it's not simple, you know, and it's perfectly normal to have people who are very short have kids who are very tall, and vice versa.
That happens.
So to really understand who you are and how you tie to the past is no simple job at all.
But since it's the title of your book, is it true that people have their mothers laugh, or is it just that they lived in the house with their mother who laughed, and so they laugh like her because they heard it so much?
I don't think science can really deliver us the definitive answer for those sorts of questions.
But you hear people say that.
I mean, I've said that about my daughter.
And I'll hear other people talking about some trait.
And we're very convinced that that's where it came from.
And to me, this underlying science is so fascinating and complex.
There's genes, there are other kinds of molecules, there's culture.
There are all sorts of things that go into making this connection between the past and the present.
But if you want to really prove that you have your mother's laugh, science isn't quite ready to help you out just yet.
How does culture enter into this discussion?
Well, culture is really kind of like a separate channel of heredity that we humans have.
I mean, we humans are really extraordinary that we really have a completely different channel of heredity that other species don't have.
So we can give information knowledge, customs to our children, to future generations, through language and through learning and so on.
I mean, we're the only species where there's really good evidence of teaching.
That's really remarkable, because what that means is that it's not like every generation has to just relearn how to crack open a nut with a rock.
You can teach children how to do it.
And then when they grow up, they could get better at it and they can teach their kids that as well.
And so you have this heredity of culture that's traveling down it's been traveling down our species probably for hundreds of thousands of years and it's it's a real secret to our success as a species so if you can't really say that you have your mother's laugh because you inherited it in the sense that it it It was a direct connection, and it passed down.
Well, then what good is this discussion?
Sometimes it's true, and maybe it's not, and maybe science can help, and maybe it can't.
Well, if it were in such the early stages, how come your book is so thick?
Well, one reason the book is so thick is because Heredity has this long, deep, powerful history.
Heredity means a lot to us.
And so part of what I'm doing in the book is trying to explore why it means so much to us.
And also like what kind of trouble we can get ourselves into by searching for that value.
You know, there's some very dangerous aspects to our obsession with heredity.
You can look to the early 1900s in the United States when genetics emerged.
There were a number of very powerful voices who said, aha.
We understand heredity completely.
We understand why some people score higher on intelligence tests than others.
Not only that, but we think that people who score low on these tests should be sterilized.
There were thousands upon thousands of people who were sterilized in the United States based on a very wrong notion about heredity.
Nazi Germany borrowed a lot of these ideas from the United States and took them to even more horrific extremes.
So, you know, whether we really understand heredity yet or not, it still matters enormously to us.
And so we have to really understand what do we really know about heredity so far, and how much of this is just almost like illusions that we're giving ourselves about it.
My guest is Carl Zimmer.
He writes for The New York Times and he's author of a new book called She Has Her Mother's Laugh, The Powers, Perversions and Potential of Heredity.
Of the Regency Era.
You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place or as the time when Jane Austen wrote her books.
The Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals and maybe the worst king in British history.
Vulgar History's new season is all about the Regency era, the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal.
Listen to Vulgar History, Regency era, wherever you get podcasts.
When they were young, the five members of an elite commando group nicknamed the Stone Wolves raged against the oppressive rule of the Karatarakian Empire, which occupies and dominates most of the galaxy's inhabited planets.
The wolves fought for freedom, but they failed, leaving countless corpses in their wake.
Defeated and disillusioned, they hung up their guns and went their separate ways, all hoping to find some small bit of peace amidst a universe thick with violence and oppression.
Four decades after their heyday, they each try to stay alive and eke out a living.
But a friend from the past won't let them move on, and neither will their bitterest enemy.
The Stone Wolves is Season 11 of the Galactic Football League Science Fiction Series by author Scott Sigler.
Enjoy it as a standalone story or listen to the entire GFL series, beginning with Season 1 The Rookie.
Search for Scott Sigler, S-I-G-L-E-R, wherever you get your podcasts.
So Carl, as you said earlier, tall people sometimes have tall children, but sometimes they don't.
And some people with blue eyes have kids with blue eyes, but sometimes they don't.
So what are you supposed to take from that?
Well, it's not random.
And you can actually put a number on that sometimes.
Scientists will call it heritability.
And so you can say well, for height, how much of the variation in a population is due to the variation in their genes.
And the answer to that is about maybe 80%.
So, so really like genes play a huge role in, in whether people are tall or short.
And, you know, so you get a lot from your parents in that regard.
There are other traits that are, you know, much less heritable, but there's still some heritability in them, you know like you know how your personality like, are you kind of a neurotic person, for example, that
You get some of that genetically from your parents, but there's a lot of it is just environmental variation.
And so it's not that heredity is meaningless.
It's just that it's really complicated.
And it's really interesting, too, especially because now we can look at individual genes.
So for height, I can give you a list of genes and say I know that each of these genes plays a role in how tall you are.
Now, each one might only make you maybe an eighth of an inch taller on average.
So they're all tiny.
But together, they are influencing your height in really profound ways.
And we're going to find other lists of genes for all sorts of things, for risks of diseases and so on and so forth.
So we're just at the beginning of really drilling into this side of heredity.
So it's an exciting time to be writing about this.
But let's say that you grow up in a house with parents who are anxious and depressed.
And so when you get older, you have anxiety and depression.
And is it worth discussing whether or not it's heredity or environment?
Or it doesn't really matter.
It's a moot point.
It doesn't really get to the problem.
It's just an interesting discussion.
I think for individual cases at this point, it probably usually doesn't matter.
But it may be that in the future there may be ways of learning how to better deal with those disorders by understanding those genes that put us at risk.
But very casually, people will say well, you know, Fred's mother drank a lot, so that's why he drinks a lot.
Or Fred's mother was sickly and was sick all the time, and that's why he's sick all the time.
Can you claim that or not?
No, I don't.
In a sort of casual, individual basis, no, I don't think that anybody can really know that.
There are definitely some clear-cut cases, like let's say Huntington's disease, okay?
Like we know that's caused by one mutation at one gene.
And if your mother or father had Huntington's disease, you have a 50 chance of inheriting that one mutation.
And if you did, you're going to get Huntington's disease.
And so if you go on and develop Huntington's disease, people can say like well, it's a shame that he got it from his mother.
And we know that.
That's clear cut.
But Those diseases are rare.
So just say like, oh, he drinks because his father drank.
Yeah, I think that's too glib.
So what do you think of all these genetic tests that people can have?
You know, spit in a tube and learn all about your past and what you may or may not be liable to get?
What's your thought on that?
You know I am as you can tell by writing a book about this sort of stuff.
I am intensely fascinated by how our genes influence us.
But when people get these results from these companies, I think they're looking for quick and simple answers.
Tell me what my DNA says about me.
That's a complicated thing to tell for the most part.
It's pretty easy to say hey, you have this mutation, that that if you're a man, means you're colorblind.
That's pretty clear.
But when you start to get into issues about say, risks of diseases, then you really need to read that fine print.
23andMe is now starting to provide results for your risks of diseases like breast cancer and other diseases.
And in some cases they're only looking at certain mutations in these genes, like the BRCA gene, you know, and if you don't happen to have those mutations, they'll say okay, you don't have a risk of breast cancer from these mutations.
But we know that people have other mutations on these genes and they could have risks as well.
So you can't take these things at some sort of like.
You know, you can't take a test result that says you don't have these mutations as meaning you will never get cancer.
It's more complicated than that.
Is there any science behind the idea?
Let's say you look more like your mother than your father, that you're more likely to have other things from your mother than your father.
No, there's no connection between that and the gene that you know that influenced development of your liver or your brain, or so on.
Um, It's not like just because you look like one of your parents, you are more like them in some sort of deep way.
You inherit 50% of your genes from one parent, 50% from the other.
So genetically speaking, you're just a perfect 50-50 split between your parents.
Well, it is.
I mean, it is so interesting, and it is so unpredictable.
I mean, for example, I have three brothers and they all lost their hair, most of their hair, pretty early.
I did not.
I still have my hair, and my father had his hair until he died, but his father was bald.
So you wonder, well, where's the pattern there?
There's no...
So if there is no pattern, maybe there is no pattern and there's nothing to discuss.
It's possible that a couple generations back your father inherited some genes that raise your risk of baldness, but then also inherited other genes that lowered the risk and maybe sort of dominated over the other genes.
And then it was just sort of which copies of those genes that he then passed down to you and your siblings.
Just roll the dice.
And so for these complicated traits, you know you may have genes that are sort of tugging that in different directions.
You know, I've had my genome sequence and I can see that I have certain genes that raise my risk of cancer, certain genes that lower my risk of the same cancers, you know, and do they even out?
Well, that's kind of a hard thing to know right now because we still don't know that much about these genes.
So To end up with this pattern in your family?
Most of your siblings you know being bald and you not like that's what you expect from heredity.
What about dominant handedness, whether you're left or right handed?
Is that heredity or is that something else?
That does seem to be quite heritable.
The sort of genetic basis of that is really still quite mysterious.
And it's an odd thing because it's only, I guess, around 15% or so of people are left-handed.
I'm left-handed.
I am too.
And there's nobody else in my family that's left-handed for generations.
Well, I mean, how many generations back have you interrogated people, though?
That would be an interesting thing to find out.
And also in earlier generations, the left-handed people were forced to become right-handed.
So you may never know.
Absolutely right.
Is there a potential breakthrough around the corner that's going to put all this stuff in focus, or is this going to be a little incremental change?
Things will get a little bit better and you can hardly notice, but over time things will get better.
Well, I think we are in the middle of a real revolution in bringing an understanding of heredity to our health.
Because, you know, it is possible now for each of us to get all of our DNA sequenced, our whole genome, for a thousand dollars, maybe even a few hundred dollars.
I mean, you have to remember the first human genome project cost about $3 billion.
And so it's a kind of revolution like what we see in computers and phones, you know, in terms of DNA sequencing and also DNA analysis.
And we have so much data now and use computers to develop really complex models that can take on all this complexity.
So I really do think that in 10 or 20 years, medicine is going to be remarkably different.
It won't be any one single eureka moment.
It's going to be the collective work of many, many scientists who are doing that work right now.
It's a really exciting time.
It really is remarkable when you put it that way, when the first human genome cost billions of dollars and now for a couple hundred dollars you can spit in a tube and send it away and get back a lot of information that you could never get before.
It's a fascinating topic.
Carl Zimmer's been my guest.
His book is called She Has Her Mother's Laugh, The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.
And there is a link to his book in the show notes.
Thanks, Carl.
Appreciate you being here.
No, my pleasure.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Hi, I'm Adam Gidwitz, host of Grim Grimmer Grimmest.
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Gather round your digital audio podcast listening device for a good old-fashioned story.
It's the story of the cell phone.
Imagine life without your cell phone.
Some people might look back with fondness on the days before cell phones, while others might be unable to imagine how you could actually survive without a cell phone.
So where did this all begin and what might be the future of the cell phone?
Well, there's probably no better person to discuss this with than Martin Cooper.
He is considered the father of the cell phone.
Martin led the creation of the world's first cell phone at Motorola.
And Martin, this guy you're about to meet, actually made the first public cell phone call.
Martin won a Marconi Prize for being a wireless visionary who reshaped the concept of mobile communication.
He was inducted into the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame and has won an incredible number of honors and awards over the years.
He is author of a book called Cutting the Cord, The Cell Phone Has Transformed Humanity.
Hi, Martin.
Welcome.
Great to be here, Michael.
So describe, tell the story of the first real cell phone.
Well, it depends what you call a real cell phone.
When we created the first cell phone, somebody else, namely the Bell system remember.
You're maybe too young to remember the Bell system.
And they were the monopoly that ran all of our telephones before 1983.
And they invented this idea called cellular.
And their idea of what a cell phone was, was a car phone.
Just think about that, that we have been trapped in our homes and our offices by that copper wire for a hundred years.
And now the bell system was coming and telling us that we had the freedom of cell phones, but we're now trapped in our cars.
So we at Motorola just didn't believe that.
I proposed that we have the freedom that comes from being anywhere, which is a handheld telephone, a personal portable telephone.
And that's when we actually built one.
April 3rd, 1973, we actually demonstrated a working handheld portable telephone.
1973.
Even before then though, even before modern cell phones, there was something like a car phone, because you can watch old movies or, like you know, old TV shows like the Beverly Hillbillies.
And I think Mr Drysdale had a car phone and people had phones and they looked like household handheld phone receivers, right.
Right.
Car phones have been around, as you say, since the 1950s.
But those car phones used a radio channel where there was just one conversation per radio channel in a city.
You could only have maybe 30 people in the city of Los Angeles talking on a car phone.
These were pressed to talk.
Namely, you had to push a button when you wanted to talk and let go of the button when you wanted to hear somebody else.
So it was a really basic service.
And because the people that provided that service put too many people on their channels, the ability to even use a phone was minimal.
During the busy hour, the chances of getting a channel were almost zero.
So the whole concept of cellular was to make enough channels available so that you could actually make a phone call when you wanted to.
And so really those first car phones that you see in old like James Bond movies or movies with real rich people in a limousine on the phone.
It was really a walkie-talkie.
But your first cell phone, cellular phone, came out in 1973, and it took a while for it to catch on.
But I remember those early Motorola phones and I've seen a lot of pictures of them as well and they were huge.
Yeah, they were.
Even the battery.
The battery was three or four times bigger than a modern telephone.
The battery alone.
They used nickel-cadmium batteries.
You know that today we use lithium-ion batteries.
You just don't realize what primitive times there were.
In 1973 there were no personal computers, there were no large-scale integrated circuits, no digital cameras.
So if we were working with minimal tools, it took a long time before we had the technology where we could make the phone small enough, where there were enough cell sites so that when you wanted to talk you were close enough to a cell site to make it work.
Cell phones didn't really take off till almost 2000, 20 years ago.
And that's when we got to the point where almost everybody was at least aware of cell phones.
As you know, today there are more cell phones in the world, More cell phones in the United States, than there are people.
Most of the people in the world have cell phones.
There are more cell phones in the world today than there are toilets, for example.
Wow.
So at what point did people sit down and say, OK, look, we're really all in on this.
We're going to really spend some money and build all these cell towers.
And like, how did that happen?
1983 is when the first systems went on.
The very first systems had a large city like LA or Chicago and maybe a couple of dozen cell sites which could serve hundreds of people instead of tens.
But it took until the late 1990s before people could afford these phones.
The first cell phones cost for 50 cents a minute for talking.
So they were really just much too expensive.
When the smartphone came into being and I'm talking about real smartphones when Steve Jobs figured out how to provide a user interface that made sense, which was only a dozen years ago.
Cell phone.
It's really ludicrous to call it a phone, because it now became a computer that had access to the internet and access to lots of applications.
And that's only been around for 12 years or so.
It's quite amazing.
Even after... cell phones got fairly common, there still was this idea of a car phone.
Like you had a car phone and then you might also have a cell phone.
That it was still rooted in the car in a lot of ways.
Well, the only reason for that was that for years the cell phones, the handheld cell phones, just didn't work very well.
Think about it.
When you're in a car, you're using the car battery, which is huge, has great capacity.
So it's not unreasonable for a car phone to have 20 watts of output.
A cell phone has a fraction of a watt.
So you have to be pretty close to a cell site.
And it really took until around 2000 for there to be enough cell sites.
So the handheld phones were as reliable, or more so, than car phones.
Only in the last 20 years has that been possible.
Yeah, it's certainly more reliable, but my experience is it's not that reliable in the sense that, you know, calls drop all the time.
They just, you know, calls fail.
People's voice just drops out for five seconds and you don't know what they said.
Or you get that digital echoey noise and you can't figure out what they said.
And you can't get a signal sometimes.
And the audio quality is just not that good.
I mean, we do interviews with people for this podcast and one of our rules is no cell phones.
You can't be on a cell phone because it's hard to listen to the audio quality sound isn't very good.
Well, I think you're right.
I experienced that myself.
As a matter of fact, my service in my own living room is marginal, and I do get dropped calls.
The emphasis that the carriers have put on 5G is an example of how they're less interested in their customers, who are talking and listening, than they are in data, getting super high speeds and things of that nature.
And in doing so, in emphasizing what they call latency and high speeds.
They're looking for industrial customers and they're not taking care of us consumers as they ought to.
Yeah, I've always thought that's one of the reasons texting caught on.
I mean, I know there are other reasons as well, but people would just get tired of hello.
Can you hear me?
Hello?
Oh, man.
And then you got to call back.
And it seems like, gosh, by now they should have nailed that.
Yeah.
Even though we have this cellular approach where lots of cell sites all over the city, if there's too much traffic you get dropped calls.
And that's the basic reason that you're getting poor service.
There are too many people trying to get on too few channels and you get dropped calls as a result.
So what happened to Motorola?
Because I remember a time when, you know, cell phone meant a Motorola phone in the early days.
And obviously now they're not even in the game.
So what happened?
Well, it was a heartbreak to me because Motorola were the leaders and the people that took over that business after I left.
Motorola had the hubris to think that they could control the world.
And when the carriers, the people that provide the service, decided that things were to go, digital Motorola resisted that.
They said, you know, we don't need digital.
We can provide you better service. with analog.
Well, it turns out at that time they were right.
But the carriers decided that they were going to go digital and other people responded to them with digital technology.
And Motorola had trouble catching up.
And by the time they did catch up other people, specifically Samsung and Apple, had taken over the market.
Motorola ended up being bought by Google, of all things.
That lasted for about a year.
And today, Motorola is a part of a Chinese company.
It's a heartbreak to me, but it's an example of if you don't stay on your toes and compete, you get beat by other people.
What do you think about when you think back to like 1973 and you said, hey look, we've got this phone.
We just created this cellular phone.
Well, maybe.
I would imagine that you couldn't even possibly imagine that we would be where we are today with cellular technology.
Or could you?
First of all, I did tell you what primitive times there were.
The idea that you would have a computer, that you would have access to all the knowledge in the world, that you could text, that you could do video conversations.
None of those things.
We knew that was going to happen someday, but certainly not in our lifetimes.
It was clear to us, however, that someday everybody would have a cell phone.
We just knew that that was the case.
In contrast with the bell system, who thought that cell phones, they had a study done and the study concluded that there would be a maximum of a million cell phones in the world ever.
Well, it turns out they were right, because the maximum number of car phones ever were about a million.
But the story that we told at that time is that someday, when you were born, you would be assigned a phone number.
And if you didn't answer the phone, you had died.
We knew that this was going to be a big And it turned out to be quite a big deal.
And what's your sense now of, you know, is Pandora out of the box?
Any regrets?
Was this better than you'd imagined, worse than you'd imagined?
What?
Oh, I think we got a long way to go.
I think we just barely tapped the power of being connected because, at least in this country, most of the things people do on cell phones are games.
Social media is really not fundamental.
But just think of what the potential of a cell phone.
You have to go to Africa and India and Mexico to find out what the real future of the cell phone.
Because there, people are using the cell phone.
First of all, it's their first phone and their only phone.
In Africa, the cell phone is the whole basis of the money system.
The way people transfer money, save money in Africa is by using cell phones.
And the UN did a study that showed that 12 billion people in Africa moved out of severe poverty, mostly because of their cell phone.
In Mexico.
Poor villages in Mexico that never had a doctor can now get health care by a doctor in Mexico City by virtue of a cell phone and gadgets like a device a 5 device that clips on a cell phone that will allow a doctor in Mexico City to look at their eyes.
They can actually do an ultrasound of a pregnant woman using a cell phone.
So we're just barely starting to understand the power of the cell phone.
One way or another, we are just at the beginning of what the power of the cell phone will do for human beings.
And it's interesting that all of that has nothing to do with a phone call.
It is ludicrous to call this thing a phone, isn't it?
Yeah, well, it really is.
So in the next 10 years, what do you see coming in cell phone technology?
Within the next 10 years, i think you're going to see a much better coverage.
They are going to advance the the ability to process audio, so that a cell phone call will have the equivalent quality of people talking face to face.
Well, you know, i'm a futurist.
I think that uh, 30 or 40 years from now, when you do a call, that the person you're talking to will be right in front of you, virtually as real as if they were physically there.
There's no reason why we can't do that.
There's enough capacity in the radio spectrum.
We know that the amount of processing power is doubling every 18 months, Moore's law.
The amount of radio channels that we have is doubling every 30 months.
They call that Cooper's Law.
So the technology is becoming real.
And at some point, those problems are going to get solved.
Is Cooper's Law named after you?
No, I didn't name it Cooper's Law.
I called it the law of spectrum capacity.
The amount of bits of data that you can put at a given amount of radio spectrum.
People were nice enough to call that Cooper's law, but it's not a law.
It's an observation that that's been happening since radio was invented, since Marconi did the first commercialization of radio around 1900.
The capacity of the spectrum.
The number of conversations that you could hold in all of the radio spectrum has doubled every 30 months.
And if you work the arithmetic, we have a trillion times the capacity today than Marconi had back in 1900.
And that capacity is going to keep increasing.
Along the way in the development of the cell phone, were there any game-changing moments because of some new technology, you know, the transistor or some big thing, that just changed the game?
Well, it's kind of interesting, but much as I was not crazy about Steve Jobs as a person, Steve Jobs figured out the issue of the interface.
How do you connect advanced technology to a human being?
And he did work out this thing about the interface that we experience today with cell phones using icons, using things that are intuitive.
And that was a game changer.
People had had... cell phones before that that did have screens on them.
They never got it right.
I think that was a breakthrough.
The other breakthrough was in batteries.
As I mentioned before, the first batteries we had were huge.
The result was the first cell phones weighed two and a half pounds, when you talk about a modern cell phone at eight to ten ounces.
So the batteries were important.
Large-scale integrated circuits.
The chip that drives the power of a modern cell phone has over two billion transistors on it.
That first cell phone that we built measured the number of transistors in the thousands.
So I have to ask you, since you are the father of the cell phone, do you like that title?
Do you like being called the father of the cell phone?
Not really.
Like it or not, that's the title you're stuck with.
And so can we assume that, because you are the father of the modern-day cell phone, that on every bill there's one penny, that people are charged and it goes to you and by now you're a quintillionaire?
First of all, Michael, I'm not complaining at all.
I've got lots of recognition, and I'm very proud of the small contribution I've made.
It took tens of thousands of people to create the technology that what we call a cell phone today.
And when I joined Motorola in 1954, I had to sign a piece of paper.
They gave me 1 and all of my intellectual property.
Any ideas that I came up, any inventions I came up were Motorola's property.
It was the best deal I ever did Michael, because for 30 years Motorola tolerated me, tried to make an executive out of me and failed miserably.
But they let me generate ideas, build new products and have a lot of fun.
And I'm very grateful to Motorola.
So I'm totally satisfied.
Well, it is really great to hear the story from the person who lived the story and I appreciate you coming on.
Martin Cooper has been my guest, the father of the cell phone, whether he likes it or not, and he is author of the book Cutting the Cord.
The Cell Phone Has Transformed Humanity.
There's a link to his book in the show notes.
Thanks, Martin.
Appreciate you being here.
Thank you.
I really appreciate it, Michael.
I'm sincere.
You really did a nice job, and you were a smart guy.
Sneakers, or tennis shoes, or whatever you want to call them, have a fascinating past.
The sneaker goes back to the late 18th century, when rubber-soled shoes called plimsolls were first introduced.
And they were pretty crude.
In fact, there was no right or left foot.
It didn't matter.
Around 1892, the U.S. rubber company came up with a rubber-soled canvas top shoe called Keds.
By 1917, they were mass-produced.
That same year, Marquis Converse produced the first shoe that was made just for basketball, called Converse All-Stars.
Then, in 1923, an Indiana basketball star named Chuck Taylor endorsed those shoes and they became known as Chuck Taylor All-Stars, and they are the best-selling basketball shoe of all time.
Sneakers went international in 1924.
That's when a German man named Adi Dassler created a sneaker that he named after himself, Adidas.
Adi's brother Rudy started up another famous sports shoe company, Puma.
It wasn't until the 1950s that kids began wearing sneakers for everyday footwear.
And when James Dean wore them in the film Rebel Without a Cause, that's when sales really took off.
And that is something you should know.
Being the curious type that you are, I'm sure you have friends who are also curious and who would also enjoy this podcast.
So please tell them about it.
Send them a link. and let them know about this podcast.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
The Infinite Monkey Cage returns imminently.
I am Robert Ince and I'm sat next to Brian Cox, who has so much to tell you about what's on the new series.
Primarily eels.
And what else?
It was fascinating, the eels.
But we're not just doing eels, are we?
We're doing a bit.
Brain computer interfaces timekeeping fusion monkey, business cloud.
Science of the North Pole and eels.
Did I mention the eels?
Is this ever since you bought that timeshare underneath the Sargasso Sea?
Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
