Motorola Solutions, Inc.

Paul Galvin and his brother Joseph founded the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago in 1928 with $565 in capital. Their first product was a battery eliminator — a device that allowed radios to run on household current instead of batteries. The company's breakthrough came with car radios. They named the product Motorola — a portmanteau of "motor" and "Victrola," the popular phonograph brand — suggesting music in motion. The Motorola name became so associated with quality that the company adopted it as its corporate name in 1947.

On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first mobile phone call in history from a street corner in New York City. The device weighed 1.1 kilograms, was 23 centimetres long, and offered 30 minutes of talk time before requiring 10 hours of recharging. Cooper called Joel Engel, his counterpart at AT&T Bell Labs, which was Motorola's primary competitor in the race to build a portable phone. "Joel," Cooper said, "I'm calling you from a cellular phone, and it's a real cellular phone, a handheld, portable, real cellular phone."

Motorola launched the StarTAC in 1996 — the world's first clamshell mobile phone, weighing just 88 grams. It was the must-have device of the late 1990s, appearing in films and television shows as the symbol of modernity. Motorola held over 50% of the U.S. mobile phone market. The company was at its peak.

Motorola invested $5 billion in Iridium — a satellite phone network requiring 66 low-earth orbit satellites. The concept was visionary: a phone that worked anywhere on earth. The execution was disastrous. By the time Iridium launched in 1998, terrestrial mobile networks had expanded to cover most of the places where people actually lived and worked. The $3,000 handsets were heavy and could not be used indoors. Iridium filed for bankruptcy in 1999, fourteen months after launch. The satellites were nearly deorbited — until the U.S. military bought the network for $25 million.

Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2011 for $12.5 billion — primarily to obtain Motorola's portfolio of 17,000 mobile patents, which Google needed to defend Android against lawsuits from Apple and Microsoft. Google sold Motorola to Lenovo three years later for $2.91 billion, having extracted the patents it needed. The company that had invented the mobile phone was sold for less than a quarter of what Google had paid, to a Chinese electronics manufacturer.