Description
Book SynopsisIn a postCold War world, the Iridium satellite network revealed a new age of globalization. Winner of the William and Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History Award by the IEEEIn June 1990, Motorola publicly announced an ambitious business venture called Iridium. The project's signature feature was a constellation of 77 satellites in low-Earth orbit which served as the equivalent of cellular towers, connecting to mobile customers below using wireless hand-held phones. As one of the founding engineers noted, the constellation bathed the planet in radiation, enabling a completely global communications system. Focusing on the Iridium venture, this book explores the story of globalization at a crucial period in US and international history. As the Cold War waned, corporations and nations reoriented toward a new global order in which markets, neoliberal ideology, and the ideal of a borderless world predominated. As a planetary-scale technological system, the project became emblemati
Trade ReviewCollins examines the historical development of Motorola's Iridium global telecommunications project, which sought to provide cellular voice service to any point on Earth using a network of 77 low-orbiting satellites... Iridium's Apollo-like saga will capture the interest of general readers in engineering, science, history, sociology, and business, and will serve as an excellent capstone case study. Technical discussions are easy to understand, and the extensive endnotes and bibliography will satisfy the most rigorous scholar.
—R. Dupont, Louisiana State University Alexandria,
ChoiceThis is an ambitious book that connects technology, capitalism, and globalization. It is all that more audacious because it uses a failed communications platform and business model to make these connections . . . Although Iridium was a business failure, its legacy continues to be a set of cultural, social, and political expectations about global flows of information and capital. As Collins forcefully reminds us, globalization is not a given, but was (and continues to be) "actively fashioned" by those who seek "to project market values, power, and control over the totality of the planet."
—David Hochfelder, University at Albany,
Journal of American HistoryEngaging, informative, and thought provoking,
A Telephone for the World should prove to be of particular interest to business and economic historians skeptical of neoliberal pieties about innovation, to media and communications historians intrigued by the evolution of spectrum management, and to cultural and political historians fascinated by the zeitgeist of the 1990s.
—Richard R. John, Columbia University,
American Historical ReviewTable of ContentsPreface
Introduction
1. Iridium and the Global Age
2. The Global and the Engineers
3. The Global and Iridium the Business
4. "Freedom to Communicate"
5. From "It's a bird, it's a phone" to "Edsels in the sky"
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
