Narrator: What if the first smartphone wasn't the iPhone? What if a device with a touchscreen, apps, and internet access existed more than a decade earlier? In 1993, an IBM engineer named Frank Canova Jr. unveiled the Simon Personal Communicator. It was a handheld, touchscreen device that could make calls, send emails, and run applications. It was, by any reasonable definition, a smartphone. Yet, it faded into obscurity, while the iPhone, launched in 2007, would go on to become the most successful product in history. This discrepancy lies at the heart of a much larger, more complex story—one that dismantles the myth of the lone genius and reveals a hidden history of collaboration, exploitation, and accidental discovery.

In his book, The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, author Brian Merchant embarks on a global investigation to uncover the true origins of this revolutionary product. He argues that the iPhone is not the creation of a single visionary but a "convergence technology"—the culmination of over a century of innovation, built by countless unsung heroes and on the backs of a global workforce.

Narrator: The story of the iPhone is often told as a modern-day fable starring Steve Jobs as the singular genius who conjured a revolutionary device from thin air. Merchant systematically dismantles this myth, revealing that nearly every component of the iPhone has a long and complex history that predates Apple's involvement. The iPhone’s success, he argues, was not in invention but in brilliant integration, packaging, and marketing.

The core technology of multitouch, for example, was not an Apple invention. Decades before the iPhone, in the 1970s, a Danish engineer named Bent Stumpe at CERN developed a capacitive touchscreen to control a particle accelerator. Later, in the 1990s, a PhD student named Wayne Westerman, suffering from repetitive strain injury, co-founded a company called FingerWorks to create ergonomic multitouch trackpads. It was this company and its patents that Apple quietly acquired in 2005, bringing Westerman and his technology inside to form the basis of the iPhone's iconic interface. The history of innovation, Merchant shows, is not a straight line leading to one destination but a "multiverse" of parallel discoveries, with ideas often emerging simultaneously in different fields to solve different problems.

Narrator: While the iPhone wasn't invented in a vacuum, its assembly into a cohesive product was a uniquely Apple endeavor, characterized by intense secrecy and immense pressure. The project began under the code name "Purple." To staff it, managers would approach top engineers and offer them a spot on a new project they couldn't be told anything about, demanding an immediate answer. Those who accepted were moved to a locked-down floor, which employees nicknamed "the iPhone dorm," where security was paramount and even the cleaning crews weren't allowed inside.

Inside this pressure cooker, two competing teams were pitted against each other. Project 1 (P1), led by iPod chief Tony Fadell, was tasked with creating a phone by adapting the iPod's famous click wheel. Project 2 (P2), led by software executive Scott Forstall, aimed to shrink down the Mac's operating system to run on a touchscreen device. This internal competition was brutal. The P1 team struggled to make the click wheel work for dialing numbers, a process one engineer likened to using a rotary phone. Meanwhile, the P2 team faced the monumental task of making a desktop OS work on a mobile chip. Ultimately, the touchscreen vision of P2 won out, but only after what designers called a "death march"—a two-week, non-stop sprint ordered by Steve Jobs to produce a complete, compelling demo of the user interface. The personal cost was immense, with engineers sacrificing their health and relationships to bring the device to life.

Narrator: The sleek, minimalist design of the iPhone belies its chaotic and often brutal origins. Merchant travels the world to trace the device's components back to their source, revealing a global supply chain built on hazardous labor and environmental devastation. The journey begins in the mines of Cerro Rico in Potosí, Bolivia, a mountain that has been mined for centuries, first for the silver that funded the Spanish Empire and now for the tin that solders the iPhone's circuit board. Here, miners, including children, work in perilous conditions with primitive tools, chewing coca leaves to stave off hunger and fatigue.

The story is similar for other essential materials. The cobalt in the iPhone's lithium-ion battery is largely sourced from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where investigations have exposed dangerous artisanal mines employing child labor. The rare earth metals, crucial for the phone's vibrant screen and haptic feedback, are primarily mined in Inner Mongolia, China, a process that has created a vast, toxic, and radioactive lake of chemical waste. Merchant reveals that the raw materials in a $700 iPhone are worth only about one dollar, a stark illustration of the economic disparity between the consumers of high-tech gadgets and the people who unearth their fundamental ingredients.

Narrator: Many of the iPhone's most critical components were not developed through a linear, goal-oriented process but were the result of repurposed failures and happy accidents. The iconic scratch-resistant screen is a prime example. In the 1960s, the company Corning developed an incredibly strong, chemically strengthened glass called "Chemcor." Despite its remarkable properties, it was a commercial failure and the project was shelved. Decades later, when Steve Jobs was infuriated by the easily scratched plastic screen on an early iPhone prototype, he demanded a glass solution. A frantic search led Apple to Corning, who revived their old Chemcor formula. Under immense pressure from Jobs, Corning converted an entire factory in a matter of months to produce what would become known as Gorilla Glass.

Similarly, the processor that makes the iPhone so efficient was born from an accidental discovery. In the 1980s, a British company called Acorn Computers designed a powerful but simple chip called the ARM processor. During testing, an engineer was shocked to find the chip was running even when it wasn't connected to a power source, drawing just enough leakage current from adjacent circuits to function. This accidental discovery of its incredibly low power consumption made the ARM architecture perfect for mobile devices, and it now powers virtually every smartphone on the planet.

Narrator: It is difficult to imagine the iPhone without its millions of apps, but the App Store was never part of the original plan. In fact, Steve Jobs was vehemently against allowing third-party developers to create native apps for the iPhone. He feared that "crappy" apps would crash the phone, clog the network, and compromise the tightly controlled user experience. His initial solution was to have developers create web apps that would run in the Safari browser, a proposal that the developer community met with ridicule.

However, lackluster initial sales and immense pressure from both outside developers and internal executives, including Scott Forstall, forced Jobs to relent. In 2008, Apple released the software development kit (SDK) and launched the App Store. The impact was immediate and explosive. iPhone sales skyrocketed. The App Store created an entire new economy, turning developers into millionaires overnight with apps as simple and absurd as "iFart," which earned its creator nearly $10,000 a day at its peak. It was this ecosystem of applications, an afterthought born of resistance, that ultimately transformed the iPhone from a slick gadget into a true platform and a cultural phenomenon.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from The One Device is that the iPhone is not a magical object but a deeply human one, forged from a global network of ingenuity, conflict, and sacrifice. It is a monument to collective, not individual, genius. Brian Merchant's investigation reveals that for every celebrated designer in Cupertino, there are thousands of anonymous contributors: the scientists who pioneered battery technology, the engineers who developed touchscreens for particle accelerators, the factory workers assembling components in Shenzhen, and the miners extracting raw materials in Bolivia.

By tearing down the iPhone, Merchant forces us to see it not just as a tool for communication, but as a microcosm of the 21st-century global economy. It challenges us to look past the polished glass and consider the hidden costs—human and environmental—embedded within the devices we carry every day. The ultimate question the book leaves us with is not about how the iPhone changed the world, but about what our relationship with this world-changing device says about us.