Motorola

Paul Galvin and his brother Joseph founded the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in Chicago in 1928 with $565 in capital. Their breakthrough came with car radios. They named the product Motorola — a portmanteau of "motor" and "Victrola" — suggesting music in motion. The 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 and offered 30 minutes of talk time before requiring 10 hours of recharging. Cooper called Joel Engel, his counterpart at AT&T Bell Labs — Motorola's rival 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. Motorola held over 50% of the U.S. mobile phone market. The company was at its peak. Within a decade, it would be unrecognisable.

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 places where people actually lived. The $3,000 handsets were heavy and could not be used indoors. Iridium filed for bankruptcy in 1999, fourteen months after launch. The U.S. military eventually bought the network for $25 million.

Google acquired Motorola Mobility in 2011 for $12.5 billion — primarily to obtain Motorola's 17,000 mobile patents, which Google needed to defend Android against Apple and Microsoft lawsuits. 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. Motorola Solutions — the public safety and enterprise communications division — continued separately, becoming a profitable $20 billion company serving police, emergency services, and government agencies. The consumer phone brand lived on as a Lenovo subsidiary, producing budget Android phones with declining relevance.