A Telephone for the World

Collins 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 Review

Martin Collins is a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. He is the author of Cold War Laboratory: RAND, the Air Force, and the American State, 1945–1950.