50 Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy: The iPhone, Radar, and TV Dinners

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people. To search for “The Our American Stories” podcast, go to the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our next storyteller is Tim Harford, an economist and best-selling author of “Fifty Things That Shape the Modern Economy.” Here he is to tell the story about a few of those.

The iPhone has a very interesting lesson for us, I think. I mean, I don’t need to tell you how it changed the economy, but I think where they came from is a very interesting lesson. So this argument is made by an economist called Marianna Mattzakato, and she says, “Look, what is in an iPhone?” You’ve got a touchscreen. You’ve got the solid-state hard drive, you’ve got the computer chips. You’ve got algorithms, particularly algorithms that convert digital to analog and analog to digital. You’ve got GPS, you’ve got access to the Internet. You’ve got the cell phone structure. You’ve got all of that going on. Okay, these are the building blocks that Steve Jobs put together to make this amazing invention. So who invented the building blocks? And when you look at the history of it, very often they came from governments, very often the American military, although not always. For example, the touch green is a British government invention. It was invented at the Royal Radar Establishment. So you look at all these different inventions, and they all have these government or military origins, which is very striking because a lot of people, myself included, like to sing the praises of private sector innovation, the power of the entrepreneur, the creativity of the free market. I’m all for that. I believe in that, but we also have to look at the fact, and in this particular fact, a lot of these building blocks came from governments. They were put together by brilliant entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs, but he would not have had the raw material to work with. He would just have been making a clever toy if he hadn’t had these different inventions. Even Siri was designed originally for fighter pilots and eventually became repurposed for smartphones. So it’s a lesson about how sometimes the origins of these amazing inventions that shape the world around us, are not always the origins we expect. They weren’t always produced by the people who get most of the credit. Radar, originally, the idea was a couple of British scientists during the Second World War. “We’re going to create a death ray. We’re going to use electromagnetic radiation to create this beam that will heat eight pints of liquid ee blood above whatever one hundred and five degrees Fahrenheit, enough to make a pilot of a plane pass out as a knock planes out of the sky using our death rate.” And the two scientists discussing this idea very quickly realized, “There’s no way. We don’t have the power, we don’t have the range. It can’t be done.” But we could use electromagnetic waves to bounce off planes, and we could interrogate the signals that come back, and we could use that to track incoming planes. And this is a hugely important development in the Second World War because it meant for Britain. As these German bombers came over high and fast, attacking British cities, we could see them coming, and we could scramble a response, and we could actually intercept them. Change the course of the Second World War. And then various developments that made radars more powerful and more compact. You could put them in submarines, you could put them in airplanes, you could use them all over the battlefield. But on top of that, once you’ve got that military technology, you’ve got a technology that makes civilian airspace a lot safer. And initially, those early civilian flights, it was just a case of, “Well, you plot your course on the map, and you fly from one airport to another and keep away from clouds, and hopefully you one crash into another plane.” And there was a tragic crash over the Grand Canyon. Two planes, both trying to give their passengers a view over the Grand Canyon. They hit each other. Terrible loss of life. And at that point, people started saying, “You know what, we’ve got this technology. We could use it to track where all the planes are, to run a kind of air-traffic control system, and to keep everyone safe.” And ever since then, air traveler has been getting safer and safer and safer, and famously safe, no matter how dangerous it may seem when you’re up there in one of those thin tubes. And it is partly because of radar. Lots of people said you have to do the washing machine, because the washing machine liberated housewives, women who could be going out to work for money, getting economic independence, getting experienced the workplace, fully contributing to society, and there they are, they’re stuck at home doing the laundry. I wanted to write that story. I thought was a great story, but when I looked at the actual data, I found washing machines did not save women any time. What happened was, instead of doing one wash a month, you’d do one wash a day, and we all looked a lot cleaner and smelled a lot cleaner, but it didn’t actually save the housewives. The ones having to take responsibility for this didn’t save them any time. The TV dinner, on the other hand, did. And by TV dinner, I mean not just the thing in a tray that you would warm up and sit there with it in your lap, but all of the other technologies by which food was industrialized. So the idea that rather than plucking your own chicken, the chickens pre-plucked, and maybe it’s pre-seasoned and pre-stuffed, and actually, if you go to a deli, maybe it’s also pre-cooked. The other whole thing’s ready to eat. Potato chips—to prepare fresh potato chips, to finally slice all the potatoes and to heat up the hot oil and all the mess and the risk of that involves, and to fry them—huge amount of time and effort. But you can buy potato chips in a bag. Take seconds, you can eat them anywhere. Pre-chopped salads: you don’t need to chop your own side, you don’t need to wash your own lettuce. The salads there in a bag. All of these different technologies: frozen meals, takeaway pizza, the whole lot. All of this save women an enormous amount of time. So with all of these inventions, we should be asking ourselves what can we do to enjoy the benefits without the costs. Technologist never just solve problems. They always create some problems as well, and so there’s always an opportunity for us to do better.

And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler, and a special thanks to Tim Harford. He’s the author of “Fifty Things That Shape the Modern Economy,” and the stories today are on the iPhone, radar, and TV dinners, and reminded, of course, of that 1956 Grand Canyon mid-air collision, which I’d seen pictures of as a kid and just did not know that this was—this was the beginning, the catalyst that prompted modern radar, the story of the iPhone, radar, and TV dinners. Tim Harford here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, and I’m inviting you to help Our American Stories celebrate this country’s 250th birthday only a short time away. If you want to help inspire countless others to love America like we do, and want to help us bring the inspiring and important stories told here to millions for years to come, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Our American Stories. Go to Alamericanstories dot com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Any amount helps. Go to Alamericanstories dot com and give.