milestones

It’s National Engineers Week and we’re celebrating the many contributions of our engineers at Motorola over the past 84 years.

Motorola was a true pioneer in personal communications. We introduced the world’s first commercial portable cellular phone. We even invented the groundbreaking Six Sigma quality improvement process, which became a worldwide standard for excellence. Check out this Motorola timeline to see many of our accomplishments over the decades, and read an excerpt from our archives below.

This video features some of our current innovators discussing their passion for what they do and reflecting on the role engineering has played throughout history:

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 In the 1960s, one of the U. S. space program’s most ambitious goals was to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. In 1968, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) began manned Apollo flights that led to the first lunar landing in July 1969. Apollo 11 was particularly significant for hundreds of Motorolans involved in designing, testing and producing its sophisticated electronics.

Motorola supplied thousands of semiconductor devices, ground-based tracking and checkout equipment, and 12 on-board tracking and communications units. An “up-data link” in the Apollo’s command module received signals from Earth to relay to other on-board systems. A Motorola transponder received and transmitted voice and television signals and scientific data.

Aboard Apollo’s lunar excursion module (LEM), a Motorola transceiver sent radio signals to three Earth-based receiving stations where Motorola FM demodulators converted them for radio and television broadcast. Motorola equipment enabled millions of people to watch and listen on July 20, 1969, as astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon–250,000 miles (400,000 km) away–and announced, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

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