Innovation Hero — Laila Ohlgren
For International Women’s Day 2021 I wrote about one female innovation hero per day for the week of 8th to 12th of March. Some of them you might have heard of, some of them not but they are all super inspiring in their own way and in their own domain.
Innovation hero Day 5 — Laila Ohlgren
Day 5 and the last name on this list for my International Women’s Week is someone I had the great pleasure of meeting some 15 years ago, Laila Ohlgren.
Laila Ohlgren was awarded the Polhem Prize in 2009 which is like the Nobel Prize for engineers in Sweden, and Laila was the first female engineer to ever receive the prize.
I had heard the story of Laila and how she was part of inventing modern mobile telephony, but I really wanted to hear for myself.
So one day I plucked up my courage, looked up her telephone number (I was amazed such a distinguished person was in the phone book!) and gave her a call. At first she was reluctant, meaning that she didn’t really think what she had done was anything special, and she joked that she was probably a bit old to go on a date, but she agreed to meet for coffee since she was going to an event the week after and maybe we could meet there before the event?
It turned out that she was going to be awarded an honorary prize at Mobilgalan, the annual Swedish awards ceremony for the mobile and telecom industry.
Anyway, we met and we had a lovely conversation. Not only about inventing modern telephony, but about leadership, what creates innovative organizations, the importance of allowing people creative space, encouraging skunk work projects in the workplace and not least about how happy she was to have been part of so much of Sweden’s technological development in the second half of the 20th century.
She told me about how they back in the 50-ies when designing the Swedish television broadcasting network, they used paper maps, pencil and rulers, drawing lines and calculating where the broadcast stations should be positioned. She told me about how she got a job at the national telephone company (Televerket) in 1956 without an engineering degree but was encouraged by her father-in-law to study in the evenings and get her degree, which she did and passed, making her the first female engineer to work on telephony in Sweden. But not only in telephony, Laila was a true pioneer in her field in so many ways.
Anyway, during our talk we also (of course) covered the serendipitous moment when she got the idea that literally changed the world.
At that time, most of the national telephone companies in Europe were trying to make the shift from old telephones with a rotary dial to something new. But they were all faced with the same problem — it took too long to dial a number if you were driving whilst dialing, it was enough to pass a building to lose the connection.
Laila told me about long days and nights, trying to figure out how to get the dialed number across faster. Then one day she was talking to one of the other engineers who told her about these new microprocessors they had bought. Laila was fascinated, and being the curious person she was and also thanks to working in an environment where, as she put it, anything and everything was possible and everyone was supportive, she asked them if it would be possible to store a phone number in a microprocessor and let the machine send the number when the line was opened. So in fact instead of lifting the receiver and dialing the number, you dialed a number and then lifted the receiver.
All said and done, they built a machine down in the workshop (what they would call a makerspace today 🙂). The machine was actually a big box, where they even used an old rotary dial phone to enter the phone number into the processor, and then they had a button they could press to send the number. (If anyone remembers the first Ericsson Hotline portable phones, the button you pressed was actually called “Send”).
Then she and her colleague, who you might know by name, Östen Mäkitalo, spent the Whitsun weekend of 1979 testing this, driving around Stockholm, making thousands of test calls.
And I will never forget when she told me about this, even though almost 30 years had passed, just by telling me about it she was transported back in time, and I found myself sitting there with Laila in 1979 and re-living the moments of discovery, when she realized that her idea worked and worked again, flawlessly.
This was the birth of modern mobile telephony as we know it, and it set the new world standard for mobile communication.
Laila made an incredible impression on me, she was the nicest, most humble person, and at the same time she was energetic and happy and kept repeating how much FUN she had had during the almost 50 years she worked at what was the national Swedish telephone company when she started, and that had turned into the telecom company Telia when she retired. She started and ran Telia Research together with Östen Mäkitalo and 150 eager engineers, and during her career she did so much for female engineers, both encouraging young girls to study tech and always tried to get female engineer students to do their master thesis work under her at Telia.
It pains me that I can’t tag Laila here on LinkedIn, or have coffee with her again, she passed away in 2014, but I am grateful, happy and consider myself so lucky to have met one of Sweden’s best engineers of all times, and that I was allowed to sit down and have a wonderful discussion with her. Laila will forever be in my heart, I never make a presentation about innovation without mentioning her, and whenever I get asked who I want to mention as a Innovation Hero, then Laila is always on the top of my list. ❤❤❤
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
