A Telephone for the World

Often a project begins with a simple question: Why did this happen?  The “this” for me was contemplating an object I had collected for the National Air and Space Museum—an Iridium communications satellite built by Motorola, a preeminent Fortune 500 company with a storied, decades-long history.  Conceptualized in the late 1980s and put into operation in 1998, such a satellite expressed a classic American trope: technological innovation that promised to shift our thinking and experience of communications from local or transcontinental to fully planetary.  A single satellite, of course, does not provide such coverage.  Rather, in Iridium, sixty six satellites organized into a low-earth orbit constellation accomplished the feat of providing a dial tone over the totality of the planet.  With a cellular-type handset, a user, whether at the North Pole or in the middle of the Pacific, could connect to anyone, anywhere in the world, via the orbiting satellites alone or through their integration with terrestrial telecommunications networks. The constellation and what it enabled were firsts in the history of telephony.

As this description suggests, one might present this story as primarily one of technological and corporate derring-do, aiming for the “next big thing”.  That narrative is not gratuitous—Iridium was rich with such impulse.  But the “why did this happen” question and the way in which it happened were grounded in the specific character of the 1980s and 1990s, marked roughly at its midpoint by the end of the decades-long Cold War.  This period saw two distinct, interrelated phenomena shaping thought and action of elites in corporations, nations, and international organizations: the ideology and policies of neoliberalism and the processes of globalization. These two terms—neoliberalism and globalization—have in popular and, to some extent, in academic imaginations become roomy, imprecise gestures to highlight the “turn to the market” begun in the 1970s and the perception of a world ever more interconnected through trade, travel, and communications.  Yet such change bumped up against persistent realities: a geopolitics still riven by postcolonial disparities in wealth and power and the fraught viability of local communities and cultures in a globalizing world.

Motorola and Iridium were inextricably bound up with these phenomena—especially as communications and computing were seen as the symbolic and actual vanguard of an emerging future. The burden of a Telephone for the World is to detail such interconnections, both to situate the project historically and to show some of the ways in which the 1980s and 1990s global was actively constructed through discrete efforts like Iridium.  My goal as author was to make concrete abstractions such as neoliberalism and globalization and in so doing to see the 1980s and 1990s as a historical formation distinct from what came before and what came after. Hence, the book’s subtitle phrase “the making of a global age”.

But an obvious challenge: can a mere, individual case study fulfill such a scholarly goal?  Not fully.  But the right case can be productive.  If we ever are to historically comprehend the broad contours and details of the late twentieth century, the linchpin is the multinational corporation—or more specifically, the US multinational. Given the US status as geopolitical superpower in the Cold War and especially after, the US multinational stood as a (if not the) critical agent in a world in which elite historical actors of all types saw markets, broadening in geographical reach, as the vital means to achieve political economic and social good.  Motorola, by happenstance and design, stood as exemplar of this moment—as high-tech firm, as operator in tens of nations, as innovator in transnationally-distributed manufacturing processes, as intimate partner with the US government, and as broadly self-reflexive about its global role as an economic and cultural actor in which postcolonial disparities mattered fundamentally.

Motorola’s end-of-the-Cold War initiation of completely-global Iridium only amplified each of these elements and their relation to the era’s steering forces. In 1990, after Motorola organized a glitzy rollout in New York, Melbourne, London, and Beijing, Iridium quickly became a media darling, especially after Cold War adversaries Russia and China signed on as investors and partners, complementing investments from every other major region of the world.  Such a coalition led zeitgeist chronicler Wired magazine to dub Iridium the first “pan-national” corporation, superseding the nation state-corporation nexus of prior history, and in grander, complementary fashion a “United Nations of Iridium,”  indicative of how market thought was reshaping the geopolitical relations among developed and developing countries.

Though multinational corporations stand as critical sites for exploring period neoliberalism and globalization, they are notoriously difficult to study.  There is a vast literature linking corporations to both themes, but surprising little scholarship built on primary source material.  The reason for this is unsurprising: corporations are reluctant to open their records to scholars.  This study was possible only through a quirk.  Iridium, soon after inauguration of service in 1998, began to falter and entered bankruptcy a mere ten months later.  Having already collected a satellite I was able to reach out to Iridium, a shadow of its 1990s heyday, with nearly all staff let go, to ask for access to their records. In the midst of the trauma of the business’s failure, they granted my request—an act of goodwill for which I am grateful.

Complemented by a range of oral history interviews conducted with key people at Motorola and Iridium, these resources provided the basis for the book—a rendering of globalization as seen from the factory floor, to Motorola as multinational agent, to Iridium as window onto the reconfigured, market-centric geopolitics of the 1980s and 1990s, all of which were infused with period ideology, attitudes toward knowledge and knowledge production, the status of individuals as workers and citizens, and culture as intractable issue.  Though it is a trite observation, a book is a journey.  When I first drove through the Arizona desert, past ranks of irrigated cotton fields, to reach Motorola’s Iridium manufacturing  factory, I had no grasp of the breadth and depth of this story.  Only after the inevitable insights that come from research did I see how the tangle of globalization embraced nearly every aspect of 1980s and 1990s life.

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. He is also the author of A Telephone for the World: Iridium, Motorola, and the Making of a Global Age