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Podcast: New Books in Technology
Episode: Martin Collins, "A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018)
Description: It’s easy to take for granted that one can pick up a cell phone and call someone on the other side of the planet. But, until very recently, this had been a mere dream. Martin Collins’ A Telephone for the World: Motorola, Iridium, and the Making of a Global Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) explores how Motorola tried—and eventually failed—to turn this dream into a reality. Collins, curator of the civilian applications satellite collection at the Smithsonian Institution, tells a remarkable story, one that is deeply relevant to our interconnected present.Using Motorola as a case s...