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for help. The solution was a car phone that could tap local landlines when Boström attached a metal-tipped pole to overhead telephone wires. The only problem with the system was the car had to remain stationary during calls. 2
    Detroit was home to the next major advance in mobile communication when the city’s police force struggled to keep up with speeding getaway cars in the Roaring Twenties. To combat the crime wave, the police hired a local engineer to build a custom radio system that enabled dispatchers to send alerts about stolen cars or robberies from headquarters over a radio channel to receivers embedded in patrol cars. The radio messages sped up police response times, but the system had its limits. Radio messages could only travel one way from the station to cruisers, which meant police officers had to find a land phone if they needed to get more information or report back to headquarters. Despite the drawbacks, the innovation gave Detroit’s finest an edge fighting bad guys. Other cities clamored for the crime-fighting device, a lucky break for a struggling Chicago radio manufacturer called Galvin Manufacturing Corporation.
    Galvin was founded in 1928 to sell parts for home radios. Stiff competition forced the company to diversify into the emerging market for car radios. Its pioneering radios, called Motorolas, were created to tap into the restless American spirit. It was the Jazz Age, and cars and roads had replaced horses and trails. What better way to see and hear the country than a car radio. Soon, company founder Paul Galvin saw potential for another market—police cruisers. “There was a need and I could see it was a market that nobody owned,” Galvin said. 3 He quickly dominated the market for mobile communicators by adding transmitters to specialized police radios, allowing two-way conversations between dispatchers and police.
    Car and police radios marked the beginning of a decades-long race by Galvin to perfect wireless communications. Innovations with transistors meant it no longer cost a fortune to build the giant transmission towers of the Marconi era. Devices were getting smaller, signals more powerful. Galvin’s next innovation turned the Illinois firm into a global player. More than forty thousand U.S. soldiers entered World War II with portable two-way radios that later became universally popular under the name “walkie-talkies.”
    Following the war, Galvin changed its name to Motorola and expanded into the professional classes with handheld pagers. Its first big paging successwas the Pageboy, introduced in the mid-1970s. Backed by a network of powerful antennas that broadcast radio messages to pagers, Pageboys kept doctors, emergency workers, and other professionals connected when they left work. Like early Detroit police car radios, the fist-sized pagers were beeping one-way communicators, because network antennas lacked the signal power to send messages back into the system. Motorola changed the electronic conversation game again in 1983, unveiling the first commercial mobile phone, the shoe-sized DynaTAC. Nicknamed “The Brick,” the device sold for $4,000 and came with a battery that lasted about an hour and took half a day to recharge.
    Cellphones were a perfect solution for mobile professionals who didn’t roam too far from headquarters, but charges rocketed if users called long distance. By the 1990s globalization was pushing so many employees to travel to distant locations that the costs and convenience of staying connected were becoming prohibitive. Wireless messages were a more affordable option, but devices and networks were primitive. Most big organizations had built custom networks and software programs to connect in-house desktop computers. But there was no standard communication language, no open, well-tended wireless roadway to shuttle mobile data to traveling employees or outside businesses, governments, and other organizations. It cost so much time and money to