1. Creating the Network

Stephen Fry traces the evolution of the mobile phone, from hefty executive bricks that required a separate briefcase to carry the battery to today’s smart little devices complete with personal assistant.

There are more mobile phones in the world than there are people on the planet.

In this series, Stephen talks to the backroom boys who made it all possible and hears how the technology succeeded, in ways that the geeks had not necessarily intended.

For starters, Stephen meets the men who first dreamt of creating a cellular network.

Back in the 1960s, two Bell Labs engineers in the US thought perhaps a maximum of 50,000 people might use a cellular phone network.

Now, there are billions of phones in the world, all of them dependent on the networks based on their design.

It was an enormous technical challenge that took decades to complete; but the main problems were political. Motorola, for example, argued that phone calls were a frivolous waste of radio spectrum compared to more worthy causes like TV.

Producer: Anna Buckley

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2011.