American engineers who developed e-mail, mobile telephone win prestigious Spanish prize

American engineers win Spanish prize

MADRID — Two American engineers who were instrumental in developing e-mail and mobile phones on Wednesday won one of Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias awards for revolutionizing the way people communicate.

Award organizers said the 2009 Prince of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research went to Raymond Tomlinson and Martin Cooper, noting that their respective work in developing e-mail and cell phone systems in the 1970s was “among the greatest technological innovations of our time.”

Cooper, 80, invented the first handheld mobile telephone in 1973, while 68-year-old Tomlinson’s programming and development of the “at” symbol revolutionized the system of electronic messages.

According to the foundation, Cooper, who was born in Chicago in 1928, became a pioneer in the wireless communication industry after receiving his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering in 1950 at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

After inventing the first mobile he went on to supervise improvements in the product over the next 10 years to make it commercially viable. He worked for Motorola for 30 years and later co-founded Cellular Business Systems, which soon dominated the mobile telephone market.

Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York, in 1941. He received a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1963 and then went on to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the late 1960s and early 1970 he helped develop the TENEX operating system, which included the ARPANET and TELNET communication applications. In 1971 he combined two programs so messages could be sent to users on other computers and introduced the “at” symbol which was to become the icon of the digital world.

The Asturias award includes a €50,000 ($70,000) cash stipend and a sculpture by artist Joan Miro.

Last year’s Technical and Scientific Research went to five scientists — four Americans and one Japanese — for developing materials to fight diseases and protect the environment.

The award is one of eight handed out each year by the Prince of Asturias Foundation covering areas ranging from the arts and humanities to science and international development. The prizes are named after Spain’s Crown Prince Felipe, whose formal title is prince of Asturias, a region of northern Spain.