10 Facts About Motorola

Motorola was founded by Paul and Joseph Galvin and produced one of the first commercially successful car radios in 1930. Today it is a Fortune 100 telecommunications company with an annual turnover of over 22 billion dollars.

1. Martin Cooper was a project manager for Motorola and invented the world’s first cellular mobile phone back in 1973, weighing in at almost 800 grams it is a far cry from today’s small and sleek handsets. However the first commercially launched handset called the Motorola Dyna-Tac was not made available to consumers until 1984
2. The Second World War led to many innovations but one of the most useful and iconic was a mobile two-way transceiver or “Walkie Talkie” which was invented by Motorola in 1940. This particular model was called the SCR-300 and was a hefty back mounted device. It was not until a year later that the company mass produced a smaller handheld unit which they called the “Handie Talkie” or SCR-536
3. Pagers were very popular during the 90s, but Motorola actually made the first one in 1956 which was used in hospitals to send radio messages to specific individuals
4. Motorola also made the first cordless large screen portable television. This TV had a 19 inch screen size
5. The company not only invented communication devices which were used on Earth, but also made the radio used by Neil Armstrong to utter the now legendary words “one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” back in 1969 on the Apollo 11 lunar module
6. High definition television is very popular nowadays but a subsidiary of Motorola called General Instrument Corporation actually proposed and launched the world’s first HDTV television all the way back in 1990
7. In 1999 the company made the iDEN i1000 plus handset, which was the first smartphone to incorporate web browsing capability, email and alphanumeric messaging.
8. Motorola’s car radios were initially sold to Police departments across America. By 1937 further communication advancements enabled them to launch a two-way version which allowed Police to communicate whilst on patrol
9. The founding company of Motorola was called Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, which was incorporated on September 25th 1928 in Chicago, Illinois. It was not until 1947 that the company formerly changed its name to Motorola
10. In 1998, Motorola was overtaken by Nokia as the world’s biggest seller of mobile phone handsets