Some of the important inventors in technology include Tim Berners-Lee, Marty Cooper and Norman Abramson. Abramson designed and developed the first wireless local area network, ALOHAnet, and was the first to transmit data wirelessly at high speeds using radio frequencies. His technology is still in use in 2015.
Berners-Lee proposed an information management system that became the World Wide Web in early 1989. Later that year, he invented hypertext transfer protocol with which he initiated the first HTTP server-to-client communication. He also invented the world’s first browser, Nexus, which, together with his previous inventions, constitute what the world now knows as the Internet. Queen Elizabeth II knighted Berners-Lee in 2004, and he received worldwide recognition as the inventor of the Internet at the opening ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics.
Cooper pioneered the field of radio spectrum management. While working at Motorola in the 1970s, he conceived and led the team that invented the world’s first cellular phone in 1973. Known as the DynaTAC, the device had a talk time of 20 minutes, needed 10 hours to charge and weighed 2.5 pounds. By 1983, Motorola had cut the phone’s size by half and dropped the price to $4,000, or the 2015 equivalent of $10,000. Although Motorola provided considerable financial and technical support for the project, the patent filed with the U.S. Patent Office names Cooper as the lead inventor of the device, and he receives credit as the father of the cellphone.