His technological predictions were more on target than his sartorial ones—pocketed vests are out, obviously—but the outline of a smartphone-like technology, replete with the ability to connect to a globe-spanning, internet-like “brain,” feels prescient.
Other keystones of the smartphone, like the touchscreen, were slipping into the technoculture too. The vision of a touchscreen-operated communications device that lets people interact or receive real-time information from around the world would become both a mainstay of science fiction and a pursuit of real-life engineering. Sometimes, it’d be hard to tell the difference.
In the 1940s and 1950s, some of the most influential computer scientists believed that personal computers would one day serve as knowledge augmenters—devices that would help people navigate an increasingly complex world. Vannevar Bush, a brilliant engineer and onetime head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, envisioned the memex, a “memory index” device that would allow users to access vast libraries of data with the touch of a hand. His colleague and disciple J.C.R. Licklider, meanwhile, had foreseen the dawning age of human-computer symbiosis: “The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought,” he wrote in 1950. Neither had any inkling that the vessel that would ultimately tightly couple brain to computer—that would enable that human-machine symbiosis—would be the cell phone.
Vannevar Bush’s memex, as diagrammed in Life magazine in 1945.
In fact, the spark for modern computers and modern mobile phones was struck in the same space, foreshadowing the closeness with which they’d be bound. Cell phones became feasible pretty much immediately after the discovery of transistors, the key ingredient to modern computers, at Bell Labs.
Science fiction shaped what would become the smartphone as well, with two sources of inspiration looming large: “Star Trek. No doubt,” Garcia says. “The tricorder and the communicator are direct influences, and I’ve spoken to several innovators who have specifically cited Trek.” The second is 2001: A Space Odyssey, which featured a device called a Newspad. “I think 2001 is the most mainstream representation of an iPhone- or iPad-size device in the late sixties,” Novak says, “if you look at the Newspad in 2001, I mean, that’s an iPad.”
Around the same time, Alan Kay designed the first mobile computer, the Dynabook: “A combination of this ‘carry anywhere’ device and a global information utility, such as ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the libraries and schools (not to mention stores and billboards) of the world to the home.”
Computers and cell phones would develop on separate tracks for the next half a century—researchers made smaller, faster, more multifunctional phones and computers until eventually they both were small enough to be smashed together.
The first device to be packaged explicitly as a “smartphone” was the Ericsson R380—a standard-looking cell phone that flipped open to reveal a touchscreen that could be used with a stylus. Nokia had phones that could run apps and play music. There was even another device, launched in 1998, that was actually called the iPhone—it was billed as a three-in-one “Internet Touchscreen Telephone” that functioned as an email reader, telephone, and internet terminal and was sold by a company called InfoGear.
“Without those, the iPhone would never have happened,” Garcia says, “and I’ll add another note—if any of those 1990s handhelds had succeeded, the iPhone never would have happened, because Apple would not have seen a field ready to be plucked!”
Get Smart
Frank Canova saw that field. But back in 1993, he was anxious.
“I walked outside, took a deep breath,” he says, describing the day of Simon’s first public demo. “I called the guys back in Florida and said, ‘We’re all set up, we’re ready to go.’ HQ was nervous. They had a backup—they didn’t know if we were going to be ready.” Canova grows excited as he recounts the story.
“There was a moment there, when I’m standing outside the convention center, when I had my calendar on the phone, and I could talk to a person and share with them what the schedule was. We even had it set up so they could send me a message and update my calendar from headquarters. From Florida. And there was that moment going, Wow, this is totally different. This isn’t your IBM PC at that stage, this wasn’t a classic desktop computer with a DOS prompt. This wasn’t a cell phone, where you could make a verbal call. This was a way to interconnect people. And that was the point. That moment, where I stood outside of COMDEX, where I had a chance to take a deep breath and realize that this was about to change the world.”
If this were a Hollywood movie, or even a TED Talk or a business-management bestseller, this is when all the hard work would pay off. This is when, having overcome the odds, the Simoneers, as they’d taken to calling themselves, would launch a bestselling, world-changing product and put it on retail shelves around the world.
It didn’t happen.
IBM sold only fifty thousand Simons over the six months it was available, between 1994 and 1995, before the company discontinued the product. Yet when I told people that I was going to interview the man who held the first smartphone patent, the reaction was universal: He must be loaded. “Ha, well, as you can see, I’m not,” Frank says, gesturing to his engineer’s office—by no means spartan, but far from opulent. “IBM owns the patent anyway. I do get called to defend prior-art patents just about every year, to help companies show that smartphones go way back.”
There are a number of reasons that the Simon didn’t take off. (In business parlance, it flopped or failed, but those are misnomers, since it’s hard to argue that a crucial iPhone forebear failed—you wouldn’t say Einstein’s grandfather failed because he didn’t introduce the theory of relativity himself). Some of the reasons are obvious: It was expensive, retailing for $895. It was bulky, heavy, and, because this was before the mass adoption of Wi-Fi, it could be used to send email only via dial-up. And, unlike the iPhone, its media capabilities were incredibly limited; it couldn’t play high-quality video or music, and its games were crude.
“And let’s be honest, it’s ugly as hell,” Canova says with a laugh. But it had to be, to house the hardware. As Frank says, it’s all about time frames.
Think of it this way: Steve Jobs is one of the most celebrated entrepreneurs in modern history. As I’m writing this, Frank Canova doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. (By the time this gets published, he very well could, of course, and it may have been written on a smartphone.) Most of the iPhone engineers I spoke with didn’t cite the Simon as a major influence; some hadn’t even heard of it, and some had forgotten about it. It’s nonetheless undeniable that the two phones have a slew of overlapping functionalities and philosophies. There’s something that seems almost universal about the devices, maybe because their inventors were drawing from a rich shared history of technological concepts and pop-culture predictions.
It’s hard to shake the sense that the Simon was the iPhone in chrysalis, however obscured by black plastic and its now-comical size. The point isn’t that Apple ripped off the Simon. It’s that the conceptual framework for the smartphone, what people imagined they could do with a mobile computer, has been around far, far longer than the iPhone. Far longer than Simon, even.
“It’s this push and pull,” Novak says. “There’s this 2012 Tim Cook interview with Brian Williams. Tim Cook holds up his iPhone and says, ‘This is The Jetsons. I grew up watching The Jetsons, and this is The Jetsons.’ Of course it’s not. But it embodies what he thought, growing up, futuristic technology looked like… I spent 2012 looking up every episode in The Jetsons, and there is not a single device you could construe as an iPhone. But Cook’s memory is such that it originated there. Every piece of future fiction is a Rorschach test.”
The smartphone, like every other breakthrough technology, is built on the sweat, ideas, and inspiration of countless people. Technologi
cal progress is incremental, collective, and deeply rhizomatic, not spontaneous. “The evolution to the iPhone is really a multiverse,” Garcia says. “No string of technologies leads to only one destination; each innovation leads to a series of new innovations.”
The technologies that shape our lives rarely emerge suddenly and out of nowhere; they are part of an incomprehensibly lengthy, tangled, and fluid process brought about by contributors who are mostly invisible to us. It’s a very long road back from the bleeding edge.
The story of the ideas and breakthroughs that eventually wound together into the smartphone stretches back over a century; the story of the raw stuff, the elemental materials that must come together to produce an actual unit of smartphone stretches across the globe. As long as we’re investigating the early beginnings of the iPhone, let’s examine the foundation of the physical object too.
CHAPTER 2
Minephones
Digging out the core elements of the iPhone
Cerro Rico towers over the old colonial city of Potosí, Bolivia, like a giant dusty pyramid. You can see the “rich hill” from miles away as you wind up the highway to the city gates. The landmark also goes by a nickname: “The Mountain That Eats Men.” The mines that gave rise to both monikers have been running since the mid-1500s—that’s when freshly arrived Spaniards began conscripting indigenous Quechua Indians to mine Rico.
The Mountain That Eats Men bankrolled the Spanish Empire for hundreds of years. In the sixteenth century, some 60 percent of the world’s silver was pulled out of its depths. By the seventeenth century, the mining boom had turned Potosí into one of the biggest cities in the world; 160,000 people—local natives, African slaves, and Spanish settlers—lived here, making the industrial hub larger than London at the time. More would come, and the mountain would swallow many of them. Between four and eight million people are believed to have perished there from cave-ins, silicosis, freezing, or starvation.
“Cerro Rico stands today as the first and probably most important monument to capitalism and to the ensuing industrial revolution,” writes the anthropologist Jack Weatherford. In fact, “Potosí was the first city of capitalism, for it supplied the primary ingredient of capitalism—money. Potosí made the money that irrevocably changed the economic complexion of the world.” South America’s first currency mint still stands in its downtown square.
Today, Cerro Rico has been carved out so thoroughly that geologists say the whole mountain might collapse, taking Potosí down with it. Yet around fifteen thousand miners—thousands of them children, some as young as six years old—still work in the mines, prying tin, lead, zinc, and a little silver from its increasingly thin walls. And there’s a good chance some of that tin is inside your iPhone right now.
We didn’t last half an hour down there.
Anyone with the stomach for it can glimpse the inside of this deadly mine, as enterprising Potosínos offer tours of the tunnels and shafts that make up the labyrinth under Cerro Rico. My friend and colleague (and translator) Jason Koebler arranged for us to take the plunge. Our guide, Maria, who also works as an elementary-school teacher, tells us that the tours go only to the “safe” parts. Yes, she said, many still die in the mines every year, but the last two, killed last week, were just kids who got drunk and got lost and froze to death. We shouldn’t worry, she says. Sure.
The plan was to don hard hats, boots, protective ponchos, and headlamps and descend a mile or so into Rico. Before driving us to the entrance, Maria stops at Miner’s Market, where we buy coca leaves and a potent 96 percent alcohol solution to give as gifts to any laborers we might encounter. Up top, the sun beats down hot but the air stings cold. Look out of the mine’s opening, past a cluster of rusty mine carts, and the city of Potosí is splayed out in the distance.
I’m nervous. Even if tourists spelunk here each week, even if children work here every day, this slipshod mine tunnel is still terrifying. Potosí is the highest-altitude major city in the world, and we are even higher than the city, at about fifteen thousand feet. The air is thin, and my breathing is short. One look at the splintery wooden beams that hold open the narrowing, pitch-dark mine shaft we’re about to walk down, one lungful of the sulfuric air, and my only impulse is to turn back.
Thousands of workers do this every day. Before they do, they bribe the devil. Did I not mention that the miners of Cerro Rico worship the devil? If not the devil, then a devil, El Tío. Near the entrance to most mines, there’s an altar with an obscene-looking effigy of El Tío. Cigarette butts and coca leaves are crammed in his mouth, and beer cans lie at his feet; miners leave offerings as a bid for good luck. God may rule the heaven and earth, but the devil holds sway in the subterranean. Jason, Maria, and I light him three cigarettes and get ready for the deep.
Mining on Cerro Rico is a decentralized affair. The site is nominally owned by Bolivia’s state-run mining company Comibol, but miners don’t draw pay from the state; they work essentially as freelancers in loose-knit cooperatives. They gather the tin, silver, zinc, and lead ores and sell them to smelters and processors, who in turn sell to larger commodity buyers. This freelance model, combined with the fact that Bolivia is one of the poorest countries in South America, makes regulating work in the mines difficult.
That lack of oversight helps explain why as many as three thousand children are believed to work in Cerro Rico. A joint study conducted in 2005 by UNICEF, the National Institute of Statistics, and the International Labor Organization found seven thousand children working in mines in the Bolivian cities of Potosí, Oruro, and La Paz. According to 2009’s The World of Child Labor: An Historical and Regional Survey, child labor was also found in mining centers across the region, including Huanuni and Antequera. So many children work in Bolivia that in 2014, the nation amended its child labor laws to allow ten-year-olds to do some work legally. That does not include mining—it’s technically illegal for children of any age to work in the mines. But lack of enforcement and the cooperative structure make it easy for children to slip through the cracks. In 2008 alone, sixty children were killed in mining accidents at Cerro Rico. Maria tells us that the children work the deepest in the mines, in smaller, hard-to-reach places that are less picked over. It’s high-risk, boom-or-bust work, and children will often follow their fathers into the mine to supplement the family income or pay for their own school supplies. Mining is one of the most profitable jobs an unskilled laborer can find, due in part to the steep risks.
Ifran Manene, an ex-miner who now works as a guide, started laboring here when he was thirteen. His father was a miner who spent his life working Cerro Rico. Ifran joined him as a teenager to help supplement the family income and worked alongside him for the next seven years. Today, Manene’s father suffers from silicosis, a lung disease that afflicts many who spend years in the mine inhaling silica dust and other harmful chemicals—part of the reason why the life expectancy of a full-time miner in Cerro Rico is forty.
Workers get paid by the quantity of salable minerals they pry from Rico’s walls, not by the hour. They use pickaxes and dynamite to break the rock free and load it into mine carts for transportation; the workers are said to distrust more efficient technologies because they would eliminate jobs. As a result, the mining inside Cerro Rico looks a lot like it did hundreds of years ago.
On a good day, these miners can make fifty dollars each, which is a hefty sum here. If they don’t manage to find any significant amount of silver, tin, lead, or zinc, they make nothing. They sell the minerals to a local processor, who will smelt small quantities on-site and ship larger amounts of ore out of the city to an industrial-size smelter.
Silver and zinc are shipped to Chile by rail. Tin is shipped north to EM Vinto, Bolivia’s state-run tin smelter, or to Operaciones Metalúrgicas S.A. (OMSA), a private one. And from there, that tin can make its way into Apple products.
“About half of all tin mined today goes to make the solder that binds the components inside our electronics,” Bloomberg report
ed in 2014. Solder is made almost entirely of tin.
So, I think; metal mined by men and children wielding the most primitive of tools in one of the world’s largest and oldest continuously running mines—the same mine that bankrolled the sixteenth century’s richest empire—winds up inside one of today’s most cutting-edge devices. Which bankrolls one of the world’s richest companies.
How do we know that Apple uses tin from EM Vinto? Simple: Apple says it does.
Apple lists the smelters in its supply chain as part of the Supplier Responsibility reports it makes available to the public. Both EM Vinto and OMSA are on that list. And I was able to confirm through multiple sources—through miners on the ground as well as industry analysts—that tin from Potosí does in fact flow to EM Vinto.
Thanks to an obscure amendment to the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial-reform bill aimed at discouraging companies from using conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, public companies must disclose the source of the so-called 3TG metals (tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold) found in their products.
Apple says that it set about mapping its supply chain in 2010. In 2014, the company began publishing lists of the confirmed smelters it uses and said it was working to rid its supply chain of smelters buying conflict minerals altogether. (As of 2016, Apple had become the first in the industry to get all the smelters in its supply chain to agree to regular audits.)
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