Inside the Smartphone: 120 Years of Hidden

The device in your pocket right now contains nine antennas, a transparent mesh of indium tin oxide, and a camera sensor with 200 million individual light-detecting cells. You've probably never thought about any of that. That's not a criticism — it's basically the thesis of Professor Hannah Fry's documentary for the Wonder channel, which tears apart a modern smartphone component by component and traces each piece back to its surprisingly weird origin story.

This is the kind of explainer that rewards people who've always sensed there's more going on inside their phone than they've been told. There is. Considerably more.

The antenna that ate the phone

The obvious place to start is the bit that makes a phone a phone: the antenna. Samsung's head of smartphone R&D, Dr. Won-Joon Choi, walks Fry through something that will quietly rearrange your mental model of the device. There is no discrete antenna inside your phone. The metal body is the antenna — or rather, nine antennas, separated by those tiny gaps you've probably noticed in the frame and never once wondered about.

Why nine? Because your hand is going to block at least one of them. The phone is constantly running signal comparisons across multiple antennas and adjusting digitally — the equivalent of climbing onto the roof to rotate the old TV aerial, except it's happening thousands of times a second without your involvement. That thing you do when you're losing signal, holding the phone up toward a window and tilting it slightly? The phone was already doing that. You were just performing solidarity.

The lineage here runs back to 1897 and Guglielmo Marconi, through the car phone (which dates to the 1940s, not the Gordon Gekko era most people associate it with), and through a 1947 Bell Labs proposal from an engineer named Douglas Ring. Ring's idea — reduce the transmission area into small repeating cells rather than one massive tower — is the conceptual foundation of every mobile network on earth. It took thirty years to build the infrastructure. Marty Cooper, who built the first handheld cell phone in 1973 while working at Motorola, made the first public cellular call partly to taunt Bell Labs, which is the kind of institutional rivalry that drives engineering forward faster than any roadmap.

The DynaTAC that followed weighed two kilos. We thought that was progress.

A pickle will do

The touchscreen section might be the documentary's most satisfying, because the explanation for why a Korean sausage works as a stylus — and why a gloved finger does not — turns out to be a physics lesson disguised as a comedy bit.

Your touchscreen is not detecting pressure. It's detecting electrical disturbance. Beneath the glass is a transparent mesh of indium tin oxide that holds a charge. Your body, being mostly salty water, also conducts electricity. When your finger comes close, the two electrostatic fields interact, and the phone's processor reads the location of that interaction. A sausage works for the same reason. A fork doesn't. A gloved hand doesn't. This is why South Koreans during a particularly cold winter in 2010 ended up using packaged meat as a productivity tool, and reportedly drove a 40% sales increase for at least one sausage manufacturer.

The technology traces to E.A. Johnson's 1960s work on air traffic control systems, where the stakes of mistyped call signs were high enough that someone had to solve the keyboard problem. CERN's particle accelerator control room got the first transparent version in 1976. Multi-touch came later, when processing power finally caught up. The iPhone in 2007 brought it to mass market — which is the moment most people think the story starts, when it's actually closer to where it ends.

The photo Kodak didn't want you to see

Steve Sasson joined Kodak in 1973 and was given a loose brief: look at this new device called a charge-coupled device and see if there's anything useful in it. Willard Boyle and George Smith at Bell Labs had sketched out the CCD as a memory chip in roughly an hour in 1969. It was shelved as a memory solution because it was too slow, but it had an interesting property: it converted light into electrical charge. Sasson figured out that if you could capture those charges before they faded — within about 100 milliseconds — and convert them into numbers, you had a digital image.

The first digital camera was the size of a toaster and weighed about eight and a half pounds. Sasson pointed it at a lab technician named Joy, viewed the result on a television screen, and received what is probably the most historically accurate product review ever given: "Needs work."

Joy was not wrong about the face. But the concept was sound. Kodak patented it and then spent the next several decades pretending it didn't exist.

Sasson, in Fry's documentary: "We did world-class research. We just never told anybody about it. And the reason we never told anybody about it was because fundamentally, we didn't like the answer."

That's a remarkable thing to say out loud about your employer, and it's even more remarkable that it's accurate. Kodak's business was film — the shooting of it, the processing of it, the printing of it, all through Kodak. A camera that didn't consume film wasn't a product. It was a threat. So they sat on Sasson's work until 2001, by which point everyone else had built the industry Kodak invented. By 2012, they were on the edge of bankruptcy. This is what happens when you let your revenue model make your technology decisions.

The sensor that ended up in your phone arrived via a different route: Japanese photo booths called purikura, which spread across arcades in the late 1990s and generated enough demand for cute self-portraiture that Sharp built a camera into a mobile phone. The operator J-Phone ordered 2,000 units with the camera and 8,000 without. The camera version sold out. The rest stayed on shelves.

The room where Xerox gave it all away

Here's where I stop being a neutral narrator, because this part has bothered me since I was old enough to understand what happened.

Xerox PARC built the Xerox Alto in the early 1970s. It had a graphical user interface, a mouse, drop-down menus, scrolling, and icons. Not in a rough prototype sense — in a twelve-year-olds-can-figure-it-out sense. One of those twelve-year-olds was Marion Goldin, who showed up at PARC in 1973 specifically because for once there wasn't a sign saying the computer program was for boys only. She sat down, used the mouse, and described the experience to Fry as "basically like magic."

Marion Goldin now works in user interface engineering at Apple. She went from being a child test subject for a technology her employer couldn't monetize to spending her career building the thing that replaced it. I find that less poetic than indicting — it means PARC had the right technology, tested it on the right people, got the right results, and still managed to do nothing with it. The machine was working. The organization wasn't.

Nobody in a position of authority at Xerox appears to have considered that the computer might be worth more than the toner. When Steve Jobs visited PARC in 1979, computer scientist Larry Tesler demonstrated the system — and according to Tesler's recollection, as presented in Fry's documentary, Jobs responded with something like: "You're sitting on a goldmine. This is insanely great. Why aren't you doing anything with this?" Tesler's account is the version on record here; I can't independently verify what Jobs said in that room. But what happened next is documented: the Xerox executives let Jobs take the ideas. They just handed them over. The company that built the graphical interface watched another company build the industry around it and then, eventually, bought a lot of Macintoshes for its offices.

The whole section of the documentary dealing with PARC has this quality of watching someone leave their lottery ticket on the bus. You know how it ends. They don't yet.

Peak phone

Fry closes with a question that Samsung's own engineers apparently can't fully answer: what comes after this? She floats the idea that we might be at "peak phone" — that the cultural appetite for more screen time is starting to reverse even as the hardware keeps improving. The manufacturers know the form factor has probably hit a ceiling. They don't yet know what replaces it.

That's an unusually honest thing for a technology documentary to sit with, and it's worth sitting with here too. The smartphone is the product of 120 years of compounding invention — radio waves, cellular networks, electrostatics, digital sensors, graphical interfaces — most of which was developed for completely different purposes by people who had no idea they were building a pocket computer. The question of what accumulates into the next thing is genuinely open.

Your phone's nine antennas are already working on it.

Mike Sullivan covers the technology industry for BuzzRAG.