The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  “It’s a computer, so you have to boot it up,” Canova says with a laugh as Simon emits a distinctly 1990s-flavored beep. Its yellow-green LCD screen lights up, and when I touch icons, like one named Address Book, they open new applications. The battery no longer lasts for more than a few seconds, so we keep it plugged in, but otherwise, it works seamlessly. The number pad is responsive. There’s a slide-tile game. Sure enough, it feels like an 8-bit iPhone.

  “So this is Simon the product,” he says. “The year prior to this coming out, in 1992, we had a prototype. I wrote a bunch of apps for the technology demo—we had all sorts of, I’ll call it visionary things, I wanted to put on there, so I included a map, GPS, stock quotes. We had an app for a whole bunch of things; we had games.” Since the Cloud didn’t exist yet, and large hard drives were too big to fit in a handset, many apps couldn’t be included on the machine itself. The plan was to create a system to support add-on cards that would plug in to enable functionalities like GPS. He had proposed an old-school, IRL app store.

  Canova, who is now in his fifties, is energetic and sharp. His head is clean-shaven and he sports a thick, graying mustache and a quick, mischievous smile. He grew up in Florida with a love of tinkering and gadgets; he was more Wozniak than Jobs, and experimented with hardware in his spare time. “I was a hacker, and hackers, well, from that era—hackers meant you could build a computer from scratch. So, I was building computers,” he says, some based on the motherboard designs of Steve Wozniak. “It was unfortunate, I’ll call it, to live in Florida, outside of where the [Silicon] Valley stuff was going on.”

  He graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the Florida Institute of Technology and went to work for IBM. He stayed at the company for sixteen years, rising through the ranks thanks to his mastery of both hardware and software. In the 1980s, he joined an “advanced research team” that was in charge of engineering IBM’s first laptop computer and making it as small as possible. “One of the goals there was just to make a computer that could fit in your shirt pocket,” Canova says.

  But the researchers didn’t have the technology to make a computer that small. Then, as the laptop project was hitting a wall, one of IBM’s neighbors presented the team with a fortuitous opportunity. “In Boca Raton, we had Motorola literally right down the street from us. Big plant, making all sorts of wireless products. They were very popular at the time,” Canova says. That’s putting it mildly: In the early 1990s, Motorola was the largest seller of cell phones in the world. And its Florida branch had an unusual business philosophy for the time—they were interested in sharing notes and collaborating with IBM. The engineers began exploring ways that they might combine the two tech giants’ product lines. “Everyone was thinking, How do you put a radio inside a desktop computer?”

  But Canova had grander ambitions. “It immediately became clear to me that, no, you don’t want to have something to look like a computer at all. If you’re making a radio, you want it to be portable. You want to hold it in one hand; you want to have it be intuitive, so what could your thumb do? You don’t want to select something and have to type a command in every time you want it to do something, which in the DOS era is how you started programs.” He didn’t know what to call it, but Frank Canova wanted to build a smartphone.

  “We approached Motorola about doing a joint project, essentially a smartphone project, and Motorola said no. They basically said, ‘Well, we’re not so sure about this shaky idea of yours,’” Canova says. But they agreed to support the team behind the scenes and provide Canova’s group with the latest phone models. “We had to rub the names off of stuff, we had to paint over Motorola logos, because we were using their parts for this very first prototype of a smartphone back then.”

  Motorola wanted nothing to do with the first smartphone. Soon it became clear that IBM wasn’t so sure either. “Honestly, IBM really wasn’t interested in this business,” Canova tells me. But he was convinced that he’d clawed at the kernel of something groundbreaking. He just needed the funding to prove it. He’d already convinced one of the sales managers to go to bat for the Simon, but that manager still had to win over his boss.

  “The way he sold it,” Canova says, “is I gave him this list of stuff you could do with a smartphone. So he took a big bag and he walked it over with all sorts of toys to our head guy who was running the Boca Raton site, and he said, ‘Okay, we need funding. And it’s funding for a thing that’s going to do a lot of stuff.’ So he pulled out a calculator and plopped it on his desk. Pulled out a GPS radio and plopped it on his desk. Pulled out a big book and maps, says, ‘It’s going to do that. And this.’ And he starts filling up his table with all this stuff. And he says, ‘You know, all this is going to be in one device. It’s not going to be all this separate stuff.’”

  The one-device presentation worked back in 1992 too. Frank’s team got the funding and scrambled to build a functioning prototype to show off at a technologies-of-the-future booth at COMDEX, then a major trade show. The team worked such long hours that Canova’s newborn baby became a familiar sight in the lab—one of the only ways the new father could squeeze in time with him was to bring him to IBM.

  The blitz paid off. The project briefly drew acclaim in the media, and IBM directed more resources to Canova’s team. “To me, it was fundamental to make that interface as easy to use as a phone you could just pick up,” Canova says. And that’s exactly what IBM did.

  “The Simon was ahead of its time in so many different ways,” Canova says, a bit wistfully. That’s an understatement. Smartphones wouldn’t conquer the world for two more decades.

  “There’s really nothing new,” Matt Novak says. “Apple and Samsung can believe that they invented these technologies, but there’s always something that predated them, at least on paper.”

  Novak runs Paleofuture, a blog dedicated to collecting and analyzing the past’s futuristic fantasies and predictions, and we’re talking about the modern conception of the smartphone and the long history of similar devices—both real and imagined—that preceded the iPhone, and even the Simon.

  Visions of iPhone-like devices can be traced back to the late 1800s. One of the earliest and most striking is an 1879 cartoon by George du Maurier that appeared in the satirical Punch Almanack. Titled “Edison’s Telephonoscope,” it’s a winking speculation about what it might look like if the famed American inventor managed to combine the telephone with a transmitter of moving images.

  The caption reads as follows:

  (Every evening, before going to bed, Pater- and Materfamilias set up an electric camera-obscura over their bedroom mantel-piece, and gladden their eyes with the sight of their Children at the Antipodes, and converse gaily with them through the wire.)

  Paterfamilias (in Wilton Place): “Beatrice, come closer, I want to whisper.”

  Beatrice (from Ceylon): “Yes, Papa dear.”

  Paterfamilias: “Who is that charming young Lady playing on Charlie’s side?”

  Beatrix: “She’s just come over from England, Papa. I’ll introduce you to her as soon as the Game’s over!”

  If you translate that Victorian vernacular into modern English and squint a little, you see wealthy parents FaceTiming with their kids away at summer camp. Maurier’s speculation made the same promises that smartphone advertisers do today—the promise of never missing a moment with your friends and family, of unfettered communication, of having a portal into any part of the world.

  In 1890, the futurist and satirist Albert Robida describes another telephonoscope in his illustrated novel The Twentieth Century. This one transmits both “dialogue and music” and the scene of a place itself “on a crystal disc with the clarity of direct visibility.… Thus we could—what a wonder (!)—become a witness in Paris of an event that took place a thousand miles away from Europe.”

  Many of these visions, I should note, were satirical—they saw the connected, electrified world as being full of absurdities and distractions—so the fact that t
he prophecies proved accurate shouldn’t necessarily be cause for celebration.

  Robida imagined people using his tScope (twenty-first-century branding was still beyond his grasp, so I’ve taken the liberty of helping him out) for entertainment—watching plays, sports, or news from afar; Maurier pictured people using it to stay ultraconnected with family and friends. Those are two of the most powerful draws of the smartphone today; two of its key functions—speed-of-light social networking and audiovisual communication—were outlined as early as the 1870s.

  These ideas, whether fantastic or feasible, are constantly patched into what some academics term technoculture, the interplay between, well, technology and culture. It’s a firmament of ideas that drives both invention and imagination. So it’s not really surprising these particular smartphonic concepts, visions, and fantasies sprang up in the late 1800s. The electric revolution was fully under way then, driven by a flurry of already substantiated inventions, each stemming, mostly, from the telegraph.

  The first optical telegraphs, or line-of-sight semaphores, were put into use during the French Revolution, to transmit military information between France and Austria. They could only transmit the equivalent of two words per minute, but information could suddenly travel many miles. Still, the general concept is ancient: Imagine the feeling of recognizing friendly code in a plume of smoke after spending the day warding off invaders of the Great Wall of China in 900 B.C.—it’d be at least as satisfying as getting a notification of a fresh round of Likes.

  The telegraph took off in 1837, around when Samuel Morse commercialized the electrical variant, allowing data—via his eponymous code—to be carried across vast lengths of wire. “In a historical sense, the computer is no more than an instantaneous telegraph with a prodigious memory, and all the communications inventions in between have simply been elaborations on the telegraph’s original work,” according to the history of technology scholar Carolyn Marvin.

  “In the long transformation that begins with the first application of electricity to communication, the last quarter of the nineteenth century has a special importance,” Marvin writes. “Five proto–mass media of the twentieth century were invented during this period: the telephone, phonograph, electric light, wireless, and cinema.” If you’re counting, these are the prime ingredients for the smartphone you’ve got in your pocket right now.

  A lot of technological progress has resulted from chasing those germs to their logical conclusions; high-res video, infinite playlists, LTE wireless networks, among others. But ultimately, of all the early transformative electric technologies, it’s the phone that became the vessel for the rest.

  “It’s a phone first; it wasn’t a computer at all,” Canova says of his Simon. “It did have to have all of these features behind it which needed a computer, but you shouldn’t expose the computer to the end user. You have to expose a very simple, basic user interface; you want the computers to be invisible.”

  At his office desk, he swings over to his landline phone, picks it up, and puts it to his ear. “And the phone’s interface is easy and natural,” he says. In the 1990s, everybody knew how to use it, because there are few devices more fundamental to modern civilization than the telephone.

  A century before, however, the telephone was so novel that many investors and officials considered it a toy. Even so, Alexander Graham Bell wasn’t the first to pioneer the concept. The idea of transmitting sound over an electric telegraph hung so thick in the air in the 1870s that some half a dozen figures are routinely placed in consideration for the phone’s inventorship, including Elisha Gray, the electrical engineer who filed a similar patent on the very same day as Bell.

  But Bell was a determined developer, presenter, and marketer, a lot like his contemporary Thomas Edison and a lot like Steve Jobs. He was also a gifted linguist and an educator who developed programs that helped the deaf learn to speak.

  According to Bell, the telephone is said to have begun, like many myth-draped American inventions, with an epiphany. “If I could make a current of electricity vary in intensity precisely as the air varies in density during the production of sound,” Bell said, “I should be able to transmit speech telegraphically.” According to Herbert N. Casson’s 1910 history of the telephone, Bell “dreamed of replacing the telegraph and its cumbrous sign-language by a new machine that would carry, not dots and dashes, but the human voice. ‘If I can make a deaf-mute talk,’ he said, ‘I can make iron talk.’” Initially, he envisioned placing a harp at one end of a wire and a “speaking-trumpet” at the other; the tone of a voice spoken into the trumpet would then be reproduced by the harp strings. He was also testing new technologies to improve his Visible Speech program when he mentioned his experiments to a surgeon friend, Dr. Clarence J. Blake. “Why don’t you use a real ear?” he asked. Bell was game.

  The surgeon cut an ear from a dead man’s head, including its eardrum and the associated bones. Bell took the skull fragment and arranged it so a straw touched the eardrum at one end and a piece of smoked glass at the other. When he spoke loudly into the ear, the vibrations of the eardrum made tiny markings on the glass.

  “It was one of the most extraordinary incidents in the whole history of the telephone,” Casson noted. “To an uninitiated onlooker, nothing could have been more ghastly or absurd. How could anyone have interpreted the gruesome joy of this young professor with the pale face and the black eyes, who stood earnestly singing, whispering, and shouting into a dead man’s ear? What sort of a wizard must he be, or ghoul, or madman? And in Salem, too, the home of the witchcraft superstition! Certainly it would not have gone well with Bell had he lived two centuries earlier and been caught at such black magic.” Through the experiment, Bell noticed that the thin eardrum could effectively transmit vibrations through bones. So he imagined a “membrane telephone”—two iron disks, à la eardrums, placed far apart and connected by an electrified wire. One would catch the vibrations of sound, the other would reproduce them—this was the theoretical basis for the telephone. Somehow, it’s fitting that there’s an actual human ear ingrained in the technical DNA of the phone. Bell won a patent for his telephone in 1876, and today it’s widely considered one of the most valuable ever awarded.

  After the technology was proven to work, Bell had a hell of a time trying to get anyone to think of it as much more than a scientific curiosity, though the effect of a voice transporting itself across an electrical wire was enough to turn heads and draw crowds. He took the invention to the Philadelphia Centennial, where he displayed it for amused audiences. Bell, an astute pitchman, hit the lecture circuit to show off his telephone and gave what were basically technology demos—early Steve Jobs–like keynotes. “Bell, in eloquent rhapsodies, painted word-pictures of a universal telephone,” Casson wrote. By 1910, there were seven million telephones across the United States, population ninety-two million. “It is now in most places taken for granted, as though it were a part of the natural phenomena of this planet.” It was the original phone that began our century-long drift toward being always connected, always available.

  Graham Bell’s infamous, “most valuable” patent, filed in 1876.

  The next step was to cut the cord and make the telephone mobile—an idea that was in the air by the early 1900s. The satirical magazine Punch presciently ran a cartoon in its Forecasts for 1907 issue that depicted the future of mobile communications: A married couple sitting on the lawn, facing away from each other, engrossed in their devices. The caption reads: These two figures are not communicating with one another. The lady is receiving an amatory message, and the gentleman some racing results. That cartoon was lampooning the growing impact of telephones on society, satirizing a grim future where individuals sat alone next to one another, engrossed in the output of their devices and ignoring their immediate surroundings—lol?

  The first truly mobile phone was, quite literally, a car phone. In 1910, the tinkerer and inventor Lars Magnus Ericsson built a telephone into his wife’s car; he used a
pole to run a wire up to the telephone lines that hung over the roads of rural Sweden. “Enough power for a telephone could be generated by cranking a handle, and, while Ericsson’s mobile telephone was in a sense a mere toy, it did work,” Jon Agar, the mobile-phone historian, notes. The company named after this invention, of course, would go on to become one of the biggest mobile companies in the world.

  In 1917, a Finnish inventor named Eric Tigerstedt—whose groundbreaking work in acoustics and microphones earned him the nickname of “Thomas Edison of Finland”—successfully filed a patent for what appears to be the first truly mobile phone. In Danish patent no. 22901, Tigerstedt described his invention as a “pocket-size folding telephone with a very thin carbon microphone.” It’s more of a direct precursor to a flip phone, but it shares some distinct design and aesthetic features with the iPhone—thin, minimalist, compact. It’s the earliest design for a mobile phone I’ve seen that feels truly modern. New ideas about handheld devices, networks, and data-sharing were beginning to emerge at that time as well—ideas presaging the internet, mobile computing, and global interconnectivity—at least from the better futurists of the day.

  Eric Tigerstedt’s “very thin” mobile-phone patent, circa 1917.

  “When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole,” the famed scientist and inventor Nikola Tesla told Collier’s magazine. “We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket.”