The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  Like I said: we didn’t last half an hour down there.

  Ifran Manene, the teenage miner turned tour guide, puts it bluntly. Two of his friends are in the hospital right now. His father is sick. “Every year, we have more than fifteen miners die” in Cerro Rico alone, he says. And he tells me this without a trace of lament, like it’s perfect normal. The sum of this human cost is difficult to comprehend, and there are stories like this taking place on almost every continent behind many of the dozens of elements in the iPhone.

  It’s an uncomfortable fact, but one we’d do well to internalize: Miners working with primitive tools in deadly environments produce the feedstock for our devices. Many of the iPhone’s base elements are dug out in conditions that most iPhone users wouldn’t tolerate for even a few minutes. Cash-poor but resource-rich countries will face an uphill struggle as long as there’s a desire for these metals—demand will continue to drive mining companies and commodities brokers to find ways to get them. These nations’ governments, like Bolivia’s, will struggle to regulate the industry. For the foreseeable future, miners will continue to do backbreaking, lung-infecting labor to bring us the ingredients of the iPhone.

  There’s another critical material we haven’t discussed, and it’s the first thing you touch after you grab your iPhone—its chemically strengthened, scrape resistant glass.

  CHAPTER 3

  Scratchproof

  Break out the Gorilla Glass

  It’s a universal, gut-churning feeling—the phone slides from your hand, just out of range of your frantic lunge to catch it, and lands with a painful crack on the floor. Then, the swelling anxiety as you pick it up—you almost can’t bear to look—to see if your screen survived. The sigh of relief when, amazingly, it did. Or, the sinking despair when it didn’t. Still, when you consider the amount of abuse your phone endures—it barely registers a scratch after sharing front pocket real estate with your keys, being slid face-down across rough surfaces, or taking tumbles off tables and desks—the glass that coats its display is pretty remarkable. So is where it comes from.

  If your grandparents ever served you a casserole in a white, indestructible-looking dish with blue cornflowers on the side, then you’ve eaten out of the material that would give rise to the glass that protects your iPhone. That dish is made of CorningWare, a ceramic-glass hybrid created by one of the nation’s largest, oldest, and most inventive glass companies.

  In the early 1950s, one of Corning’s inventors, a chemist named Don Stookey, was experimenting with photosensitive glass in his lab at the company’s headquarters in upstate New York. He placed a sample of lithium silicate into a furnace and set it to 600˚C (about 1,100˚F)—roughly the temperature of a pizza oven. Alas, a faulty controller allowed the temperature to climb to 900˚C (about 1,650˚F)—roughly the temperature of intermediate lava as it exits the earth. When Stookey realized this, he opened the furnace door expecting that both the experiment and his equipment would be ruined. To his surprise, he found the silicate had been transfigured into an off-white-colored plate. He tried to pull it out of the furnace, but it slipped out of his tongs and fell to the floor. Weirdly, it didn’t break—it bounced.

  Inventors had been stumbling around shatterproof glass for at least a half a century by then. In 1909, a French chemist and art deco artist named Édouard Bénédictus was climbing a ladder in his laboratory when he accidentally knocked a glass flask off the shelf. Instead of shattering and sending shards of glass flying, the flask cracked but stayed in one piece. Perplexed, Bénédictus studied the glass and realized it had contained cellulose nitrate, a liquid plastic, which had evaporated and left a thin film inside. That film had snagged the glass shards and prevented them from scattering on impact.

  The artist and inventor spent the next twenty-four hours in a frenzy of experimentation; he knew that nascent automobile windshields were dangerously prone to shattering, and he saw a solution. Later that year, Bénédictus filed the world’s first patent for shatterproof safety glass. But carmakers weren’t initially interested in a more expensive glass, even if it was safer. It wasn’t until World War I, when a version of Bénédictus’s invention was used in the eyepieces of American soldiers’ gas masks, that safety glass became cheap to manufacture. (Military-scale industrialization tends to have that effect.) And in 1919, a full decade after Bénédictus’s happy accident, Henry Ford began incorporating the glass into his windshields.

  But it was Don Stookey who invented the first synthetic glass-ceramic. Corning would go on to call it Pyroceram (it was the brink of the 1960s, and awkward, quasi-futuristic portmanteaus were all the rage). The stuff was light, harder than steel, and much, much stronger than typical glass. Corning sold it to the military, where it was used in missile nose cones. But the real boon came when Corning found synergy with another ascendant technology: the microwave. Corning’s line of serving dishes—CorningWare—worked well in the futuristic food cooker. They sold like radiated hotcakes.

  In the late 1950s, according to a famous bit of company lore, Corning’s president, Bill Decker, had a chat with William Armistead, the company’s chief of research and development. “Glass breaks,” Decker remarked. “Why don’t you fix that?”

  CorningWare didn’t break, but it was opaque. Given the material’s success, the company effectively doubled its research and development budget. And thus, Corning launched its magnificently titled Project Muscle with the goal of creating still stronger, transparent glass. Its research team investigated all forms of glass strengthening that were known at the time, which mostly fell into two categories: the age-old technique of tempering, or strengthening glass with heat, and the newer one of layering types of glass that expanded at different rates when exposed to heat. When those various layers of glass cooled, the researchers hoped, they’d compress and strengthen the final product. The Project Muscle experiments, which hit full throttle in 1960 and 1961, combined both tempering and layering. It soon led to a new, ultrastrong, remarkably shatterproof—and scratchproof—glass.

  “A breakthrough came when company scientists tweaked a recently developed method of reinforcing glass that involved dousing it in a bath of hot potassium salt,” explains Bryan Gardiner, a reporter who investigated Corning’s relationship with Apple in 2012. “They discovered that adding aluminum oxide to a given glass composition before the dip would result in remarkable strength and durability.”

  The ingenious chemical-strengthening process relied on a new method called ion exchange. First, sand—the core ingredient of most glass—is blended with chemicals to produce a sodium-heavy aluminosilicate. Then the glass is bathed in potassium salt and heated to 400˚C (752˚F). Because potassium is heavier than the sodium in the original blend, the “large ions are ‘stuffed’ into the glass surface, creating a state of compression,” according to Corning. They called the new glass Chemcor. It was much, much stronger than ordinary glass. And you could still see through it.

  Chemcor was fifteen times stronger than regular glass—it was said that the stuff could withstand pressures of up to 100,000 pounds per square inch. Of course, the researchers had to be sure, so they set out to stress-test the wonder glass. They hurled tumblers made of Chemcor glass off the roof of the research center onto a steel plate. Didn’t break. So they stepped it up a bit; in the experiments, they chucked frozen chickens onto sheets of the new glass. Fortunately, Chemcor glass proved frozen-poultry-proof too.

  By 1962, Corning figured the glass was ready for prime time. But Corning had no idea how to market Chemcor—or, rather, it had too many ideas. So Corning set up a press conference in downtown Manhattan to show it off and let the market come to it. They banged it, bent it, and twisted it, but failed to break it. The stunt generated good PR; thousands of inquiries about the glass poured in. Bell Telephone considered using Chemcor to vandal-proof its phone booths. Eyeglass makers had a look. And Corning itself developed some seventy ideas for potential product uses, including sturdy windows for jails and, yes, shatter
proof windshields.

  But, as with Bénédictus, the interest led to few takers. For automakers, who by then were using our French friend’s laminated technique, Chemcor was simply too strong. When carmakers orchestrated crash tests, well—“Skulls were not left intact after colliding with it,” Gardiner says. Windshields need to break in car accidents if the humans inside are to survive. Chemcor ended up in some of AMC’s classic Javelin cars, but production was soon discontinued.

  Forty-two million dollars had been invested in the product by 1969, and Chemcor was ready to strengthen the world’s panes. But the market had spoken; nobody really wanted superstrong, costlier glass. It was just too expensive, too unique. Chemcor and Project Muscle were scrapped in 1971.

  Three and a half decades later, in September 2006, just four months before Steve Jobs planned to reveal the iPhone to the world, he showed up at Apple HQ in a huff.

  “Look at this,” he said to a midlevel executive, holding up a prototype iPhone with scratch marks all over its plastic display—a victim of sharing his pocket with his keys. “Look at this. What’s with the screen?”

  “Well, Steve,” the exec said, “we have a glass prototype, but it fails the one-meter drop test one hundred out of one hundred times—”

  Jobs cut him off. “I just want to know if you are going make the fucking thing work.”

  That exchange may be notable for its snapshot of ultra-Jobs-ness, but it had real ramifications.

  “We switched from plastic to glass at the very last minute, which was a curveball,” Tony Fadell, the head of the original iPhone’s engineering team, tells me with a laugh. “There were just so many things like that.”

  The original plan had been to ship the iPhone with a hard plexiglass display, as Apple had done with its iPod. Jobs’s about-face gave the iPhone team less than a year to find a replacement that would pass that drop test. The problem was, there was nothing on the consumer-glass market that fit the bill—the glass on offer was mostly either too fragile and shatter-prone or too thick and unsexy. So, first, Apple tried to do its own in-house glass strengthening. The record is murky as to how long or how seriously this was tried—Apple didn’t exactly have a massive materials-science division in the mid-2000s—but it was abandoned.

  A friend of Jobs suggested he reach out to a man named Wendell Weeks, the CEO of a New York glass company called Corning. Long after inventing microwavable ceramic, Corning had continued to innovate—beyond Pyroceram, its researchers also invented low-loss optical fibers, in 1970, which helped wire the internet itself. In 2005, as stylish flip phones like the Razr were ascendant, Corning returned to the scrapped Chemcor effort to see if there might be a way to provide strong, affordable, scratchproof glass to cell phones. They code-named the project Gorilla Glass after the “toughness and beauty” of the iconic primate.

  So when the Apple chief went to visit the head of Corning in its upstate New York headquarters, Weeks had a recently reinvigorated half-century-old research effort in full swing. Jobs told Weeks what they were looking for, and Weeks told him about Gorilla Glass.

  The now-infamous exchange was well documented by Walter Isaacson in his biography Steve Jobs: Jobs told Weeks he doubted Gorilla Glass was good enough, and began explaining to the CEO of the nation’s top glass company how glass was made. “Can you shut up,” Weeks interrupted him, “and let me teach you some science?” It was one of the rare occasions Jobs was legitimately taken aback in a meeting like that, and he fell silent. Weeks took to the whiteboard instead, and outlined what made his glass superior. Jobs was sold, and, recovering his Jobsian flair, ordered as much as Corning could make—in a matter of months.

  “We don’t have the capacity,” Weeks replied. “None of our plants make the glass now.” He protested that it would be impossible to get the order scaled up in time.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Jobs replied. “Get your mind around it. You can do it.” According to Isaacson, Weeks shook his head in astonishment as he recounted the story. “We did it in under six months,” he said. “We produced a glass that had never been made.”

  Corning had prototyped the stuff fifty years ago but never produced the material in any significant quantity. Within years, it’d be covering the face of nearly every smartphone on the market.

  Gorilla Glass is made with a process called fusion draw. As Corning explains it, “molten glass is fed into a trough called ‘an isopipe,’ overfilling until the glass flows evenly over both sides. It then rejoins, or fuses, at the bottom, where it is drawn down to form a continuous sheet of flat glass that is so thin it is measured in microns.” It’s about the width of a sheet of aluminum foil. Next, robotic arms help smooth the overflow, and it’s moved into the potassium baths and the ion exchange that gives it its strength.

  Corning’s Gorilla Glass is forged in a factory nestled between the rolling tobacco fields and sprawling cattle ranches of Harrodsburg, Kentucky (population 8,000). The plant employs hundreds of union workers and around a hundred engineers.

  “The reason that a place like Corning comes to this area is to hire guys that have grown up on farms,” Zach Ipson, a local farmer, told NPR in 2013. “They know how to work.” Outside the idyllic town known for its bountiful tobacco harvests, a key component of one of the world’s bestselling devices is forged in a state-of-the-art glass factory. It’s one of the few parts of the iPhone that’s manufactured in the United States. “When [I] tell someone where I live and where I work, they’re surprised that we have this high-tech manufacturing operation in the bluegrass area that’s known for bourbon and horses and farmland,” engineer Shawn Marcum said.

  Gorilla Glass is now one of the most important materials to the consumer electronics industry. It covers our phones and our tablets, and soon it may cover just about everything else. Corning has big plans; it imagines smart screens—made with its Gorilla Glass, of course—covering every surface of the increasingly smart home. Gorilla Glass may finally come to auto windshields, fifty years after Chemcor’s initial market failure.

  Securing that Apple contract helped the company thrive, and not only because the iPhone itself proved a hit. Samsung, Motorola, LG, and just about every other handset maker that rushed into the smartphone game in the wake of the iPhone’s success turned to Corning.

  The iPhone helped awaken the technology, but Project Muscle was already there, after waiting for decades in a shuttered research lab, to scratchproof the modern world.

  A world that runs, increasingly, on touchscreens.

  CHAPTER 4

  Multitouched

  How the iPhone became hands-on

  The world’s largest particle physics laboratory sprawls across the Franco-Swiss border like a hastily developed suburb. The sheer size of the labyrinthine office parks and stark buildings that make up the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN, is overwhelming, even to those who work there.

  “I still get lost here,” says David Mazur, a legal expert with CERN’s knowledge-transfer team and a member of our misfit tour group for the day, along with yours truly, a CERN spokesperson, and an engineer named Bent Stumpe. We take a couple wrong turns as we wander through an endless series of hallways. “There is no logic to the numbering of the buildings,” Mazur says. We’re currently in building 1, but the structure next door is building 50. “So someone finally made an app for iPhone to help people find their way. I use it all the time.”

  CERN is best known for its Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator that runs under the premises in a seventeen-mile subterranean ring. It’s the facility where scientists found the Higgs boson, the so-called God particle. For decades, CERN has been host to a twenty-plus-nation collaboration, a haven that transcends geopolitical tensions to foster collaborative research. Major advances in our understanding of the nature of the universe have been made here. Almost as a by-product, so have major advances in more mundane areas, like engineering and computing.

  We’re shuffling up and down st
aircases, nodding greetings at students and academics, and gawking at Nobel-winning physicists. In one stairwell, we pass ninety-five-year-old Jack Steinberger, who won the prize in 1988 for discovering the muon neutrino. He still drops by all the time, Mazur says. We’re pleasantly lost, looking for the birthplace of a piece of technology that history has largely forgotten: a touchscreen built in the early 1970s that was capable, its inventor says, of multitouch.

  Multitouch, of course, is what Apple’s ENRI team seized on when they were looking for a way to rewrite the language of how we talk to computers.

  “We have invented a new technology called multitouch, which is phenomenal,” Steve Jobs declared in the keynote announcing the iPhone. “It works like magic. You don’t need a stylus. It’s far more accurate than any touch display that’s ever been shipped. It ignores unintended touches; it’s super smart. You can do multi-finger gestures on it. And, boy, have we patented it.” The crowd went wild.

  But could it possibly be true?

  It’s clear why Jobs would want to lay claim to multitouch so aggressively: it set the iPhone a world apart from its competition. But if you define multitouch as a surface capable of detecting at least two or more simultaneous touches, the technology had existed, in various forms, for decades before the iPhone debuted. Much of its history, however, remains obscured, its innovators forgotten or unrecognized.

  Which brings us to Bent Stumpe. The Danish engineer built a touchscreen back in the 1970s to manage the control center for CERN’s amazingly named Super Proton Synchrotron particle accelerator. He offered to take me on a tour of CERN, to show me “the places where the capacitive multitouch screen was born.” See, Stumpe believes that there’s a direct lineage from his touchscreen to the iPhone. It’s “similar to identical” to the extent, he says, that Apple’s patents may be invalid for failing to cite his system.