by Jon Agar
Marconi’s weighty wireless had to be carried by battleship. Early practical mobile phones were carried by cars, since there was room in the boot for the bulky equipment, as well as a car battery to power them. One of the most important factors permitting phones that can be carried in pockets and bags has been a series of remarkable advances in battery technology. As batteries have become more powerful, so they have provided more energy. Partly because improvements in battery design have been incremental, their role in technological change is often underestimated. The great Prussian physicist Walther Hermann Nernst, who later articulated the Third Law of Thermodynamics, had experimented in Göttingen in 1899 with nickel as a means of converting chemical energy into electrical energy. Built a century later, my disintegrated phone has a Ni-MH – Nickel Metal Hydride – battery; it is in one sense recognisably similar to Nernst’s, but in another it is transformed: it is many, many times lighter and more efficient. Step-by-step, nickel batteries have got better. Continuous experimentation with other metals has revealed slight but significant improvements, so that, for example, the early-21st-century choice for mass-produced energy packs is between nickel- and lithium-based techniques. Gradual change can eventually trigger a profound revolution. Once batteries became powerful and portable, a Rubicon was crossed. Uncelebrated improvements in batteries, put into laptops, camcorders and cellphones, triggered our mobile world.
A similar story can be told of the other bits and pieces in front of me. The LCD or liquid crystal display, the grey panel on which I read my incoming call numbers or SMS messages on my old phone, is now commonplace in consumer electronics. The contradictory properties of liquid crystals – fluids that can paradoxically retain structure – had been noted in the 19th century by the Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer. He had noticed that the organic solid cholesteryl benzoate seemed to have two melting points, and that between the lower and higher temperatures the liquid compound behaved oddly. But it was not until the 1960s that industrial laboratories, such as RCA’s in America, began to find applications exploiting this behaviour. Again, incremental development followed. Liquid crystal displays don’t produce light, they reflect light, which potentially saves energy, so changes in one component (displays) interacted with another (batteries). Much effort was needed to turn this advantage into a practical one. However, by the 1970s LCDs appeared in calculators and digital watches, replacing the red glow of light-emitting diodes.
LCDs were not essential ingredients of a cellphone (indeed my new smartphone has ditched this old display technology). We could keep in constant touch with a simple assemblage of the other bits and pieces found in the wreckage of my phone: aerials, microphones, loudspeakers and electronic circuitry. But improved screens are part of what makes a mobile phone more than a mere instrument of communication. We don’t just talk. Without the screen, the extra aspects of the mobile phone – the games, YouTube, the address books, the text messaging – all the features which contribute to a rich mobile culture, involving manipulation of data as well as transmission of the voice, would not be possible.
If I had superhuman strength I could hammer my phone into constituent atoms. A new global politics can be found among the dust. Mobile phones depend on quite rare materials: for example, within every phone there are ten to twenty components called capacitors, which store electrical charges, and since the Second World War the best capacitors have been made using thin films of a metal called tantalum. On the commodities market in the early 1990s, capacitor-grade tantalum could usually be bought for $30 a pound, sourced from locations such as the Sons of Gwalia mines at Greenbushes and Wodgina in Western Australia, the world’s best source of the element. But in the last years of the 20th century, as more and more people bought mobile phones, the demand for tantalum shot up. The price per pound rose to nearly $300 in 2000.
Tantalum, in the form of columbite-tantalite (‘coltan’ for short), can also be found in the anarchic north-east regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where over 10,000 civilians have died and 200,000 have been displaced since June 1999 in a civil war, fought partly over strategic mineral rights, between supporters of the deceased despot Laurent Kabila and Ugandan and Rwandan rebels. As the price of tantalum increased, the civil war intensified, funded by the profits of coltan export. The mobile phone manufacturers are distanced, however, from the conflict. Firms such as Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung and Motorola buy capacitors from separate manufacturers, who in turn buy raw material from intermediaries. On each exchange, the source of tantalum becomes more deniable. ‘All you can do is ask, and if they say no, we believe it,’ Outi Mikkonen, communications manager for environmental affairs at Nokia, recently said of her firm’s suppliers. On the other hand, export of tantalum from Uganda and Rwanda has multiplied twentyfold in the period of civil war, and the element is going somewhere.
To build a single cellphone requires material resources from across the globe. The tantalum in the capacitors might come from Australia or the Congo. The nickel in my battery probably originated from a mine in Chile. The microprocessor chips and circuitry may be from North America. The plastic casing and the liquid in the liquid crystal display were manufactured from petroleum products, from the Gulf, Texas, Russia or the North Sea, and moulded into shape in Taiwan. The collected components would have been assembled in factories dotted around the world. While the work might be coordinated from a corporate headquarters – Ericsson’s base is in Sweden, Nokia’s in Finland, Siemens’ in Germany, Alcatel’s in France, Samsung’s in Korea, Apple’s and Motorola’s in the United States, and Sony’s, Toshiba’s and Matsushita’s in Japan – the finished phone could have come from secondary manufacturers in many other countries.
The phone might be an international conglomerate, but it was put together in different ways in different countries, and shortly we will see how the cellular phone was imagined in different ways according to national context. I will return later to consider what the mobile tells us about our culture that has adopted it so readily. I will ask how the mobile cellphone fits with changing social structures, why it has become the focus of new types of crime, and what it can signify when it appears in cultural products such as television programmes and movies. For material components alone do not add up to a working cellphone. Indeed, it was the scarcity of a non-material resource that prompted the idea of the cellular phone in the first place.
Chapter 2
Save the ether
When Lars Magnus Ericsson was driving through the Swedish countryside, he still had to stop his car and wire his car-bound telephone to the overhead lines. If he had pressed his foot on the accelerator, the wire would have whipped out, wrecking the apparatus. It was not a mobile phone in our current sense of the word. Until the last decades of the 20th century, most telephones were like this: to use them, you had to stand still, because you were physically connected by inelastic copper wire to the national system. A few privileged people – members of the armed forces, engineers, ship captains – could command the use of a true wireless phone, connecting to the land-locked national system through radio. The reason it was a privilege was because the radio telephone had to fight for a share of a scarce resource: a place on the radio spectrum.
The first radio transmissions were profligate beasts. Take Marconi’s again. Such radio waves generated by a spark would crackle across many frequencies on the spectrum, interfering with and swamping other attempts at communication. This problem meant that early radio users had a choice: either find some way of regulating use so that interference was limited, or take a chance with a chaotic Babel of cross-talk. The route to regulation was taken. (Although not in all parts of the world: for many decades Italian radio was the liveliest in the world.) But even when radio circuits became more tuneable, so that radio transmissions could be targeted within smaller bands of frequencies, there was never enough spectrum to go around.
Governments seized the right to regulate the radio spectrum. I
n the United States the authority was the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in Britain it was the Home Office and the Post Office, and so on. But since radio waves are no respecters of national boundaries, national governments had to concede that international regulation had to take place too. Here there was a precedent. In the mid-19th century, the question of how to organise global telegraph communications had prompted the creation of one of the first truly international organisations: the International Telegraph Union (ITU), with headquarters in the neutral Swiss city of Geneva. With the arrival of the fixed-wire telephone in the late 19th century it made sense to extend the ITU’s powers over the new technology. Likewise, the ITU was on hand to provide an organisational structure to regulate international frequency allocation for radio. Every few years, giant international conferences would decide, given existing and predicted use of radio, which services should be allocated a small slice of rare spectrum. These highly technical meetings reflected the world as we know it: engineers and bureaucrats sought to balance demands for new lifestyle electronics, such as music radio stations, with the commercial necessities of reliable navigation aids, and with the conflicting military imperatives of the technological infrastructures of World War and Cold War armed forces.
In these decades, a phone that worked by radio was a simple enough proposition, but was impossible to imagine as a truly everyday and popular device, since there was no way to squeeze its demands into an overcrowded spectrum already dominated by the powerful commercial and military interests of the 20th century. Each radio would have to work on a separate frequency from its neighbours, otherwise calls would be interfered with, confused, or, worse, eavesdropped. So the radio telephone was restricted to a privileged handful.
But in 1947, engineers at Bell Laboratories in the United States proposed a radically new means of imagining mobile radio. It was already shaping up to be a vintage year for Bell Labs. Pump-primed by massive expenditure to develop electronics during the Second World War, the peacetime years saw a string of lucrative discoveries. William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain had devised the transistor, the electronic component announced to the public in 1948 that would sweep away bulky valves and lead to the revolutionary lightweight electronics of the second half of the 20th century. Down a few corridors from the transistor pioneers, D.H. Ring, assisted by W.R. Young, put pen to paper, and the result was a description of the ‘cellular’ idea. It was a means of saving spectrum.
Chapter 3
The cellular idea
Ring had written down the principles on which your mobile phone works. Imagine a map of a city and imagine a clear plastic sheet, ruled with a grid of hexagons, placed over it. Now, imagine a car, equipped with a radio telephone, driving through the streets of New York City, passing from hexagon to hexagon (see diagram below).
Reusing frequencies creates a pattern of ‘cells’.
Ring’s idea was as follows. If each hexagon, too, had a radio transmitter and receiver, then the radio telephone in the car could correspond with this ‘Base Station’. The trick, said Ring, was to allocate, say, seven frequencies to a pattern of seven hexagons (‘a’–‘g’), and to repeat this pattern across the map. The driver would start by speaking on frequency ‘a’ in the first hexagon, then with ‘g’, then ‘c’, and then back to ‘a’ again. Now if the first and last hexagon were far enough apart so that the two did not interfere with each other (and this was possible, especially if low-powered transmissions were used), then a radio conversation could carry on without interference, so long as no one else was in that small hexagon, on that frequency, at the same time. If the repeated pattern of hexagons spread over the entire map, then the whole city could be covered. Suddenly, if the hexagons were made small enough, many more mobile telephones could be crammed into a busy city, and only a few of those scarce frequencies would be needed.
But notice some of the consequences of Ring’s idea, if it was to be put into practice. The driver of the car certainly did not want to have to know when the car was passing from one hexagon to the next. Indeed, when you are walking down the high street now, you are passing from cell to cell, yet this ‘call handoff’ or ‘call handover’ between cells goes mercifully unnoticed. To conceal the handover, the system needed to be able to spot when the mobile was leaving one hexagon, to find the next hexagon, and to hand over the call. In turn, this meant that the individual phone had to be identifiable; so, somewhere in the system, a database needed to be at hand containing information about where the phone was, where it was heading, and who was using it (so the call could be billed). That database had to be fast, so it had to be automatic and electronic.
Furthermore, say that the driver of the car was in fact talking to his best friend, who was in a phone box in Philadelphia 100 miles away. As the car left and entered each new invisible hexagon, the conversation would be seamlessly pieced together at some central Mobile Switching Centre (MSC), the heart of any cellular network, and then fed into the system of old landlines and exchanges, so that finally the distant driver’s voice could be heard in the phone box in Philly. For the cellular idea to work, a whole fixed infrastructure needed to be in place: base stations, a mobile switching centre constantly interrogating a database of personal and geographical information, and connections to the old Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). Just as the pocket watch required fixed institutions of agreed protocols and time standards in order that time could be told on the move, so a massive fixed infrastructure of wires, switches and agreements needed to be in place for mobile conversation. Mobility, strangely, depends on fixtures.
Ring had described the cellular idea in 1947, but it went unpublished and, for nearly two decades, gathered dust. Why was this? Partly, the reasons were technical: cellular phones would work best with higher frequencies, where transmissions could be limited to smaller hexagons and where the spectrum was relatively uncongested. But radio engineers had only slowly gathered the expertise to work at higher and higher frequencies through the 20th century. To find the radio stations found on 1920s bakelite sets, the listener had tuned to up to a few hundreds of thousands of Hertz (Hz, or cycles of radio waves per second, a measure of frequency). During the Second World War, the demand for better radios and the development of new technologies such as radar had ramped the usable frequencies up to many millions of Hz (Megahertz or MHz). The first cellular phones worked in the 800–900 MHz band. In 1947, the techniques to handle such frequencies were cutting-edge science. Furthermore, each time the mobile passed from cell to cell, different transmitting and receiving frequencies were used. In turn this meant that the mobile had to contain a frequency synthesiser, an expensive piece of circuitry to produce the different frequencies: when it was first developed for the military in the 1960s it alone would cost as much as a very good car. Partly, too, the technology of switching in the 1940s was incapable of handling the quick call handovers that the cellular idea demanded. The typical switch of the day was that found in the telephone exchange: the clattering, electromechanical relay that was too slow to implement Ring’s cellular concept.
But the answer is never simply technological, for technologies reflect the political and social world in which they are conjured up. Turning Ring’s blueprint into a working cellular phone system in the 1940s would have demanded the latest electronic techniques and a crash course to develop new ones, but more importantly the personal mobile phone fits in with social values which dominate now but did not then. The social world of the mid-20th century was hierarchical, paternalistic and even, in large swathes of the globe, totalitarian. The governing model informing both government and business was large-scale and top-down. The telecommunications of the mid-20th century reflected – and in turn bolstered – this pattern.
I was brought up in Hitchin, a small town to the north of London. In the 1960s and 1970s it was a nice place to be. We lived in a house on the outskirts, with fields out the back and the rest of t
he estate out the front. We had installed, like everyone else, a squat, heavy, black dial-up telephone by our front door. (It was a Type 300 telephone. The design had been copied from an Ericsson phone: the Prince of Wales had seen it at the Stockholm Exhibition in October 1932, and liked it.) The telephone was not our possession, but was the property of a government department, the General Post Office. Only a GPO engineer could take it to pieces if it was broken. (If I had smashed it up, like my Siemens S8, I would have been in trouble. Arguably, it would have been treason, a crime against the state.) If the telephone could not be fixed then only the GPO could supply a replacement. It would be identical – in ironic memory of the long-dead Henry Ford, it seemed as if the Post Office still insisted that you could have any colour, as long as it was black. (Other exotic colours – such as ivory – were supposedly available, but I think they were mythical.) The replacement might take a while to arrive. There was a waiting list. A long one.
The black telephone of my childhood. The Type 300 was introduced in 1938 by the General Post Office and lasted for decades. (BT Archives)
Nothing better expresses the difference between then and now than this sentiment: we did not mind. We were happy with the squat, black, unreliable telephone. The personal cellular phone would have been almost impossible to imagine in such circumstances. To say that it did not happen because the technology was not there misses an important part of the story. Technology only becomes ‘there’ when it fits the wider world. Sometime between my early days, growing up in Hitchin, and now, with the pieces of my old mobile phone in front of me, a revolution has happened. A revolution has swept away the GPO monopoly over telephony, and that revolution in turn was part of something bigger, a global sea change in both politics and technology. Cellular phones are part of this story, and not merely as flotsam but also part of the tidal wave of change itself.
