Eideard

Sunday is the anniversary of something that undoubtedly has changed your life.

Whether for good or for bad is a question only you can answer.

On this day in 1973 — on April 3 of that year — a man did something no one had ever done before…The man’s name was Martin Cooper. He was 44 at the time. He made a cell phone call.

The world’s first. At least the first public one; the cell phone had been tested in the lab, but never tried in the real world.

“As I walked down the street while talking on the phone,” Cooper once told an interviewer, “sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call…”

Cooper, who was the general manager of Motorola’s communications systems division, had the idea that people didn’t want to be tethered to a stationary telephone, even if the phone could ride along with them in their car. He thought that the phone should be so portable that it could go anywhere they went.

As he explained it in a later interview: “People want to talk to other people — not a house, or an office, or a car. Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire…”

When Martin Cooper made that first cell phone call, he did not make it to another cell phone. People didn’t have them yet — who could he call?

No, he made the cell phone call to a land line — specifically, to the land line of his chief competitor at Bell Labs.

Motorola had beaten Bell to become the first company to make personal cell phones work. Cooper, you might say, rubbed it in. Think how the Bell Labs research engineer must have felt when he heard Cooper calling him from the noisy streets of Manhattan.

He’s still alive, by the way. He’s 82. He still works in the technology field.

Bravo! Some of my peers hope he doesn’t think of any else as disruptive.

Poisonally, I welcome change as critical as the communications revolution he kicked off. If your head is screwed on tight enough – you not only can deal with qualitative change, you should be able to turn it to your own advantage. If you wish to.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures

It’s quite easy, wandering round the small town of Billund, to start believing in the existence of a Lego god. You can’t help but feel a master intelligence is at work here – the place is so manifestly wholesome, the street plan so well ordered, the pavements so tidy. Unostentatious automobiles proceed slowly along all-but-empty roads, stopping politely for pedestrians nowhere near a zebra crossing. A jovial red-and-yellow Lego giant points towards the town centre; huge coloured bricks lie scattered as if awaiting deployment in some exemplary new civic amenity (except that, being Denmark, it’s not immediately apparent what else the town might need).

I half-expect to be plucked from the pavement, brushed up a bit and plumped down in front of the smart rectangular building labelled Head Office: Lego A/S. My goal here is to find out how, in the teeth of global recession and barely five years since it was being read the last rites, one of the world’s best-loved brands has come back from the dead. For Lego, born of an earlier and tougher depression, is positively revelling in this one: the little studded, primary-coloured bricks are selling like never before. In Britain alone, the company’s turnover last year was up 51%.

Its home town, though, is a bit too much for some people. “I couldn’t ever live here,” admits Mads Nipper, who looks and – when it comes to plastic bricks – acts about 12, but turns out to be one of the company’s executive vice-presidents. “I’m nuts about Lego, believe me; I eat, sleep and breathe the stuff. But there’s a bit too much of it around here even for me.”

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Army officials have suspended most research involving dangerous germs at the biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, which the FBI has linked to the anthrax attacks of 2001, after discovering that some pathogens stored there were not listed in a laboratory database.

The suspension, which began Friday and could last three months, is intended to allow a complete inventory of hazardous bacteria, viruses and toxins stored in refrigerators, freezers and cabinets in the facility, the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.

The inventory was ordered by the institute’s commander, Colonel John P. Skvorak, after officials found that the database of specimens was incomplete. In a memorandum to employees last week, Skvorak said there was a high probability that some germs and toxins in storage were not in the database…

One scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment, said samples from completed projects were not always destroyed, and departing scientists sometimes left behind vials whose contents were unknown to colleagues.

Now, that’s reassuring. A scavenger hunt.