How Did We Get the Smartphone? Or, Understanding the Longer and Larger History of Technological Change

Announcement: We are excited for our next Civics of Tech book club on January 12, 2023, at 8:00pm EST! We’ll be reading Power On! by Drs. Jane Margolis and Jean Ryoo. Ms. Shaina Glass, a Senior Learning Director for the Computer Science Teachers Association will be facilitating our discussion. Power On! (MIT Press, April 2022) is an original graphic novel inspired by young people whose views deserve to be heard – yet who too often find that the technology they use each and every day promotes practices that keep them marginalized without a seat at the table. This book is grounded in years of computing research and is written to be accessible to students and educators. Right now it’s on sale for 20% off with the code MITPHoliday22 through the Power On! website. Now on to this week’s post…

by Scott Alan Metzger, Penn State University

Ever since Dan Krutka invited me to write the response to his chapter on technology in the Keywords in the Social Studies book back in 2018, I’ve found my mind turning more and more to the role of technology in historical change. I grew up with a strong interest in science and technology. That’s probably because my father, Dave, was a part-time inventor for an engineering company back in the late 1960s and early 1970s and a lifelong HAM (shortwave) radio enthusiast. When Dan and I started researching technology in social studies curriculum together, at last I had a topic of shared interest with my dad. Dan and I recently did a deep-dive into the smartphone as an education example to which most students can immediately relate, and that gave me the opportunity to talk with my father about a kind of history in which he is more than expert than I am. I’d like to share how his insights helped me gain a better understanding of how we got the smartphone.

Technologies are never completely new. They emerge (gradually or suddenly) from a longer pattern in which new developments displaced or disrupted existing technologies and ways of life. How a technology emerged from precursor inventions or developments is not always obvious. It is perfectly reasonable to assume that the smartphone simply emerged from the telephone of the 20th century—but the original telephone contributed little to the smartphone beyond the shape of the green pickup and red hang-up buttons. Would young people today even know why the icons have those shapes or are called pickup and hang-up? After all, smartphones do not have separate receivers or cradles. The original corded telephone is an end technology replaced by wireless telephones. Only that wireless technology is integrated into the smartphone.

What would an integrated view that situates the smartphone into a longer and larger history of changing technology look like? Before jumping into the social implications of a technology, it is useful to look at its technical history. It is possible to be very expansive and connect smartphones to their distant precursors, such as the printing press (without which there wouldn’t be text fonts) and the telegraph (the first long-distance electronic communication), but it is most valuable to situate a technology within the major of major prior developments that directly contributed to it but might not be immediately obvious. Let’s consider the top-three precursors for the smartphone.

Radio. While the telegraph invented in the 1830s pioneered virtually instant long-distance communication through electronic signals, and the telephone developed in the 1870s converted voice into and from those signals, both required cables to carry the signals. Discovery of the electromagnetic wave spectrum spurred experimentation in wireless communication, and electric devices with antennas capable of transmitting and receiving sound over the air through signals in radio frequencies (RF) were produced in the 1890s. By the 1920s, radio receivers were a mass consumer product in most households for listening to commercial stations with powerful transmitters and antennas that broadcast entertainment, news, and music over the air. In the following decades, the radio improved in sound quality, from amplitude modulation (AM) to frequency modulation (FM), while being made smaller to fit in automobiles and portable handheld devices. Wireless telephones communicating over the electromagnetic spectrum largely replaced corded telephones in the 1990s. In the 21st century, frequency hopping across the radio spectrum (how Bluetooth works) has made possible interference-free wireless connection between all kinds of digital appliances. Wireless satellite communication and Bluetooth capability are essential components for the smartphone.

Television. The first primitive machines capable of turning RF signals into moving visual images were invented in the 1920s. Using a cathode ray tube to create motion by rapidly scanning signals received over the air via metal antennas (“rabbit ears”) and projecting images onto a glass screen, home TV sets appeared in the 1930s as a luxury product that gradually lowered in price to become a mass consumer product by the 1960s. Sharing the available RF frequencies for radio and television required governments to regulate the number and geographic broadcasting range of stations. This meant that for decades there were a limited number of TV stations that could support only a few national programming networks. Since their programs could be received for free by antennas over the air, networks could not charge individual viewers and made profits by selling commercial advertisements. Since the late 20th century, cathode ray tubes were replaced by plasma screens, liquid crystal displays (LCD), and light emitting diodes (LED), resulting in vastly sharper images on much larger screens in much lighter sets. Computer and Internet integration has yielded the “smart” TV and the touch-controlled screen, and reducing this to handheld size is a chief element of the smartphone.

Personal Computer. Devices that calculate and track large numbers are as old as the counting frame (abacus) used throughout ancient Asia, but modern computing machines were first developed in the 1940s and used in World War II code-breaking and the nuclear program of the Cold War. Computing machines of the 1950s-60s so large that they filled entire rooms were available only to large businesses, universities, or government agencies. Starting in the 1970s, miniaturization of transistors and processors (microchips) allowed less expensive computers small enough for home use. When connected to a television monitor, the personal computer was born. Over the past three decades, personal computers and their viewing screens have become much smaller, lighter, and portable while still having millions of times more processing power than the ENIAC of the 1940s. As more people around the world came to own and rely on personal computing devices, the data network allowing computers to communicate over telephone lines, developed by the US military and university partners in the 1960s, expanded for commercial and public use to become the Internet. Essentially, the smartphone is a pocket-sized, Internet-enabled, touch-screen personal computer with wireless digital communication.

Technoskeptical inquiry into the longer and larger history of smartphones and their precursors should help learners form broader generalizations. All of these technologies were disruptive to prior ways. Radio disrupted the existing telegraphy industry and its network of physical wires. Television disrupted the commercial radio industry (to say nothing of the movie business). Personal computers and the Internet transformed virtually every sector of the economy and people’s lives, from entertainment to education. All of them brought tremendous benefits to individuals and to economic growth, but as commercial products they were only available to those who could afford them. The commercial advertising model and its manipulative effects have followed audiences from radio, to TV, to the Internet, and now to streaming.

 Many people living in developed nations love to buy the latest and greatest electronic gadgets (especially my dear father)—but the longer and large history of the development of smartphone technology reveals there are costs, and not just financial. Newly developed technologies start out at a price premium. Prices of electronic devices eventually lowered as more and more models were produced, but this led to rapid obsolescence of older models and decreasing consumer repair. Decades of outmoded radios, TVs, and especially computers pollute landfills with “e-waste” that can damage the environment. Smartphones are following this same trajectory. By the early 2020s, there were more than 3.5 billion smartphone users worldwide, and how to safely dispose of or recycle billions of devices upgraded each year is a major environmental challenge. Smartphones, like many other electronic devices, increasingly rely on exploited laborers to mine cobalt and other essential metals, many from poor countries in Africa. The actual products are then largely assembled in China, where the communist government and its corporate partners control the workers and the profits.

It’s enough to make me look askance at my Apple iPhone. Maybe not enough to get rid of it, as I’ve come to see just how much the rhythm of daily life is shaped by this device. But at the very least, we can appreciate how we got the smartphone and the fuller range of costs that go into it. And I am going to fight my iPhone’s obsolescence and wait as long as possible before replacing it—and contributing to the recycling problem in the future.