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SPAIN: A Princely Prize for Creators of Email, Cell-Phones

Tito Drago

OVIEDO, Spain, Oct 23 2009 (IPS) - U.S. engineers Martin Cooper and Raymond Tomlinson, considered the fathers of the mobile phone and email, respectively, received Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research from Crown Prince Felipe on Friday.

Russian athlete Yelena Isinbayeva was awarded the Prince of Asturias Award for Sports, Albanian writer Ismaíl Kadaré won the Award for Letters, and Berlin took the Award for Concord, marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent reunification of the city.

The 2009 Prince of Asturias Award for Social Sciences went to British naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough, the National Autonomous University of Mexico won the Award for Communication and Humanities, British architect Norman Foster took the Award for the Arts, and the Award for International Cooperation went to the World Health Organisation. Winners receive a 50,000 euro prize and a reproduction of a statuette designed by Joan Miró.

Cooper was the lead engineer of the Motorola team that developed the handheld mobile phone and is considered the inventor of the first handheld cellular phone, in 1973. Two decades later he developed adaptive array technology, or smart antennas, used not only in mobile telephones but also in long-range wireless Internet.

Tomlinson, after developing several operating systems, invented the software that permitted messages to be transmitted between computers in 1971, and chose the @ sign to separate local from global e-mails in the mail address – a symbol went on to became a digital icon.

The jury said “These two discoveries are among the greatest technological innovations of our time, revolutionising the way that thousands of millions of people communicate worldwide and contributing decisively to the advancement of knowledge.”


“Their impact on society is reflected by the more than four billion mobile subscribers and the one and a half billion users of e-mail and other Internet services. All this constitutes an important aid to the developing countries, for which it supposes a source of equality and opportunities, making basic services such as health and education more accessible.”

At the ceremony held in the northwestern Spanish city of Oviedo, Cooper said it was an honour to accept the prestigious award in the name of the many people who had inspired him and worked with him in the application of wireless technology for improving people’s lives all over the world. “Half of humanity already uses mobile phones,” he pointed out.

He also said this is the start of a future in which wireless technology will connect everyone, giving rise to improvements in productivity, education, entertainment and security, as well as “a radical change in our understanding of health.”

Speaking with IPS after he received the award, Cooper said he was sure that not many years would go by before mobile telephones would be able to help anticipate health problems like heart attacks.

Tomlinson said “I want to thank the Prince of Asturias Foundation for this great honour. It is a privilege to have my name associated with this prestigious foundation and added to the very impressive roster of Prince of Asturias Laureates.”

1973 Nobel Physics Prize-winner Leo Esaki of Japan, who is chairman of the Science and Technology Promotion Foundation of Ibaraki, was one of the biggest supporters of Cooper and Tomlinson, who he said had made very important contributions to society, in terms of social impact.

Their innovations in mobile phones and email are some of the most important technological innovations of all time, he said.

Kadaré, meanwhile, commented that when he was informed of the prize, people in his country thought he had been made a noble in Spain. Smiling before the journalists, he added that although his country had lived through many years of communism, Albanians felt nostalgia for nobility.

With regard to his experience of living under a dictatorship, he said the mechanisms of writing under a dictatorship did not change in times of freedom.

He also used the opportunity to criticise the government of Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero for “transferring its internal problems” to the Balkans, by failing to support the independence of Kosovo out of fear that the ETA Basque separatist movement would cite that precedent to strengthen their own claim to independence.

He clarified, however, that the two conflicts had nothing in common, because “human and social rights are respected in Spain” while what happened in the Balkans was “a tragedy, with massacres and mass killings of all kinds, including thousands of children.”

For his part, Attenborough, who the jury said “contributed enormously to our knowledge of nature and its conservation” in half a century of TV programming on the mysteries of nature, said that when he started out, youngsters did not enjoy sitting in front of the set for hours, but that today they are trapped by videogames and other technology, which separates them from nature.

WHO Director General Margaret Chan stressed that healthy people can do the most to contribute to a country’s production of wealth, whether material or intellectual, and said social services are essential and spending on health should not be seen as expenditure but as investment.

After the ceremony, the prize-winners, jury members, government officials and participating journalists were applauded by huge crowds of people in the streets as they made their way to the Hotel de la Reconquista, where they dined.

 
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