Cell Phones: The portable police radio and Apple’s secret project that changed the way we communicate

08/09/22 • 24 min

1 Listener

Your cell phone is more than just a phone. It’s your camera, address book, wallet, alarm clock, music player, map, newspaper... you get the point. And it’s changed how we interact with each other and how we navigate the world. And no cell phone has been quite as revolutionary as the iPhone. In this episode, Marty Cooper relives the rivalry between Motorola and Bell for cellular supremacy and the historic call he made using the world’s first cell phone. Then Bas Ordering gives us a behind the scenes look into working with Steve Jobs at Apple and helping design the iPhone.

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Digital Cameras: How Kodak’s blunder and the camera on a computer chip could help us see further into space

If you want a taste of just how profoundly the digital age changed photography, consider this: more pictures will be taken worldwide in the next two minutes, than were taken during the first 150 years of photography. In this episode, Steven Sasson remembers how he tinkered with a weird new image sensing technology called CCDs to invent the world's first digital camera. Then we’ll hear from his good friend Eric Fossum who explains how he miniaturized that technology to help NASA explore the solar system.

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WiFi & Wireless Comms: A Hollywood starlet’s quest to defeat Hitler led to lightbulbs that transmit the internet

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