iPhone's origins: Here is how the world's darling smartphone was born

Before anybody outside Apple was aware of it, the project that would become the iPhone was referred to internally by the code name Purple. No one seems to remember exactly why; it may have been named after a toy purple kangaroo that belonged to one of the engineers.
 
Purple was so secret that even inside Apple hardly anybody knew about it. It was developed in a lab sealed tight behind badge readers and a metal door. Employees had to sign NDAs for their NDAs. The lab became known as the Purple Dorm because people worked there round the clock, through weekends, holidays, vacations, honeymoons. They ate there. They slept there. It smelled bad.

 
In fact, although it would eventually emerge as the gleaming quintessence of the collaboration between the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Apple’s design magus, Jony Ive, Purple could seem like a nightmare of overwork, insoluble technical tarballs and political infighting. “You created a pressure cooker of a bunch of really smart people with an impossible deadline, an impossible mission, and then you hear that the future of the entire company is resting on it,” Andy Grignon, one of the iPhone’s key engineers, has said. “It was just like this soup of misery.” The Purple Dorm will no doubt one day be the setting of a taut claustrophobic drama by some future Aaron Sorkin.

 

If it does, that drama may well be based on The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, a new book by Brian Merchant, an editor at Motherboard, the science and technology division of Vice. Merchant does the important work of excavating and compiling large numbers of details and anecdotes about the development of the iPhone, many of them previously unrecorded. It’s important because along with being splash-, water- and dust-resistant, the iPhone is resistant to history.
 
The iPhone dwells among us, but it looks — it’s designed to look — as if it just moments ago entered our world from some higher, more ideal plane of existence. Just as its flat black face makes no compromise with the contours of the human skull, its gleaming, lickable surface offers no clues about where and when it was made, or by whom, or how. You can’t even open it without a special proprietary screwdriver called a Pentalobe. This is an effect not just of the iPhone’s physical design but of the strange culture of reverence and secrecy that Apple has created around its products. An example: multitouch, the technology that allows the iPhone’s touch-screen to track several fingertips at once — it’s why you can pinch to zoom. Where does it come from? Jobs always maintained that multitouch was invented at Apple. It wasn’t.

 
As Merchant demonstrates, it was actually invented several different times, including in the 1960s at England’s Royal Radar Establishment and in the 1970s at CERN. The specific multitouch technology that went into the iPhone was pioneered around the turn of the millennium by a man you’ve almost certainly never heard of named Wayne Westerman. A brilliant engineering PhD at the University of Delaware, Westerman worked on multitouch in part because he suffered from severe repetitive strain injury, which made conventional keyboard interfaces agony. Apple acquired Westerman’s company, FingerWorks, in 2005 — whereupon it and Westerman disappeared behind Apple’s Titanium Curtain. The rest is, and isn’t, history. (Apple wouldn’t let Merchant interview Westerman, or any current Apple employee, for his book. Merchant did, with characteristic thoroughness, track down Westerman’s sister.)

 
The iPhone is designed for maximum efficiency and compactness. The One Device isn’t. The three chapters on the development of the iPhone are the heart of the book, but there’s some filler too. It’s curiously unilluminating to read a metallurgical analysis of a pulverised iPhone, or to watch Merchant trudge around the globe on a kind of iCalvary in search of the raw materials Apple uses — through a Stygian Bolivian tin mine and a lithium mine in the Chilean desert and an e-waste dump in Nairobi where many iPhones end up. This kind of hacker tourism can be done well — the gold standard is Neal Stephenson’s epic 1996 Wired article “Mother Earth Mother Board”.

 
His one conspicuous success in this line is his visit to a Foxconn factory outside Shenzhen, China, where iPhones are manufactured. Foxconn has a reputation for bad labour conditions, and visiting Westerners are generaly closely chaperoned, but during a trip to the bathroom Merchant manages to ditch his minders and take a stroll through the vast, dystopian facility. “It is factories all the way down,” he writes, “a million consumer electronics being threaded together in identically drab monoliths.”
 
The iPhone masquerades as a thing not made by human hands.  Merchant’s book makes visible that human labour, and in the process dispels some of the fog and reality distortion that surround it. The One Device isn’t definitive, but it’s a start.

  © 2017 The New York Times