Constant Touch Read Free

Thermodynamics, had experimented in Göttingen in 1899 with nickel as a means of converting chemical energy into electrical energy. Built a century later, my disintegrated phone has a Ni-MH – Nickel Metal Hydride – battery; it is in one sense recognisably similar to Nernst’s, but in another it is transformed: it is many, many times lighter and more efficient. Step-by-step, nickel batteries have got better. Continuous experimentation with other metals has revealed slight but significant improvements, sothat, for example, the early-21st-century choice for mass-produced energy packs is between nickel- and lithium-based techniques. Gradual change can eventually trigger a profound revolution. Once batteries became powerful
and
portable, a Rubicon was crossed. Uncelebrated improvements in batteries, put into laptops, camcorders and cellphones, triggered our mobile world.
    A similar story can be told of the other bits and pieces in front of me. The LCD or liquid crystal display, the grey panel on which I read my incoming call numbers or SMS messages on my old phone, is now commonplace in consumer electronics. The contradictory properties of liquid crystals – fluids that can paradoxically retain structure – had been noted in the 19th century by the Austrian botanist Friedrich Reinitzer. He had noticed that the organic solid cholesteryl benzoate seemed to have two melting points, and that between the lower and higher temperatures the liquid compound behaved oddly. But it was not until the 1960s that industrial laboratories, such as RCA’s in America, began to find applications exploiting this behaviour. Again, incremental development followed. Liquid crystal displays don’t produce light, they reflect light, which potentially saves energy, so changes in one component (displays) interacted with another (batteries). Much effort was needed to turn this advantage into a practical one. However, by the 1970s LCDs appeared incalculators and digital watches, replacing the red glow of light-emitting diodes.
    LCDs were not essential ingredients of a cellphone (indeed my new smartphone has ditched this old display technology). We could keep in constant touch with a simple assemblage of the other bits and pieces found in the wreckage of my phone: aerials, microphones, loudspeakers and electronic circuitry. But improved screens are part of what makes a mobile phone more than a mere instrument of communication. We don’t just talk. Without the screen, the extra aspects of the mobile phone – the games, YouTube, the address books, the text messaging – all the features which contribute to a rich mobile culture, involving manipulation of data as well as transmission of the voice, would not be possible.
    If I had superhuman strength I could hammer my phone into constituent atoms. A new global politics can be found among the dust. Mobile phones depend on quite rare materials: for example, within every phone there are ten to twenty components called capacitors, which store electrical charges, and since the Second World War the best capacitors have been made using thin films of a metal called tantalum. On the commodities market in the early 1990s, capacitor-grade tantalum could usually be bought for $30 a pound, sourced from locations such as the Sons of Gwalia mines at Greenbushes and Wodgina in Western Australia, the world’s best source of the element. But in the last years ofthe 20th century, as more and more people bought mobile phones, the demand for tantalum shot up. The price per pound rose to nearly $300 in 2000.
    Tantalum, in the form of columbite-tantalite (‘coltan’ for short), can also be found in the anarchic north-east regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where over 10,000 civilians have died and 200,000 have been displaced since June 1999 in a civil war, fought partly over strategic mineral rights, between supporters of the deceased despot Laurent Kabila and Ugandan and