In a post-Cold War world, the Iridium satellite network revealed a new
age of globalization.
Winner of the William and Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History
Award by the IEEE
In June 1990, Motorola publicly announced an ambitious business venture
called Iridium. The project's signature feature was a constellation of
77 satellites in low-Earth orbit which served as the equivalent of
cellular towers, connecting to mobile customers below using wireless
hand-held phones. As one of the founding engineers noted, the
constellation "bathed the planet in radiation," enabling a completely
global communications system.
Focusing on the Iridium venture, this book explores the story of
globalization at a crucial period in US and international history. As
the Cold War waned, corporations and nations reoriented toward a new
global order in which markets, neoliberal ideology, and the ideal of a
borderless world predominated. As a planetary-scale technological
system, the project became emblematic of this shift and of the role of
the United States as geopolitical superpower. In its ambition, scope,
challenges, and organizing ideas, the rise of Iridium provides telling
insight into how this new global condition stimulated a re-thinking of
corporate practices--on the factory floor, in culture and knowledge, and
in international relations.
Combining oral history interviews with research in corporate records,
Martin Collins opens up new angles on what global meant in the years
just before and after the end of the Cold War. The first book to tell
the story of Iridium in this context, A Telephone for the World is a
fascinating look at how people, nations, and corporations across the
world grappled in different ways with the meaning of a new historical
era.
