Krishna
It is also a very cute book. John has taken a technical subject (satellite phone history) and turned it into a fascinating tale. This is the story of Iridium, how Motorola created this massive breakthrough technology and what happened to it. In the process you learn about Motorola, some very interesting personalities who worked on it and lots and lots of trivia about US and Soviet (and later, Russian) space programs. Delightful.
First consider the name – Iridium. It was chosen because Motorola wanted to launch 77 satellites to provide communication, and in the periodic table, the atom at position 77 was Iridium. When later, due to cost considerations, it was decided that a little bit of quality can be sacrificed and they reduced the satellites to 66, they found that the corresponding item was ‘Dysprosium’. Reaction? ‘Dysprowhat? Hell, no – the name will remain Iridium’.
This sets the tone for an extremely interesting reading experience.
Dannie Stamp is being asked to kill all the satellites he has launched in many years in the space company. Trying to save them does not work with Motorola, who owns them and has decided to destroy them all.
In the meanwhile Corusco(?) Wants to save them all and enlists the help of a billionaire hedge fund king called Castle. They both want to re position Iridium, a technological marvel of the old times, by re-positioning the marketing.
What follows is a history of rocketry and space machines. Interesting to see how von Baron went to US at the height of the war with all plans of missiles and tried to take 500 scientists with hm. US would accept only 100 and the others were taken by Soviets. So the missile technology migrated to these two countries from Germany!
The Sputnik moment is hilarious. An American scientist was given an organization called Vanguard but he was undercut by everyone including President Eisenhower and the army because they wanted ICBMs instead.
Korolov, mistaking American launch of an ICBM as a very close attempt to launch a satellite, got permission to launch Sputnik. Until then Russians also did not want to launch anything in space! He was also neglected until he scaled down the design and launched just a basic tin box as Sputnik. This scared the Americans to pour money into their own satellite programs. You have heard of the ‘Sputnik moment’ surely?
But the Sputnik team was so primitively supplied that they did not have computers and did their computations with trigonometric tables and mechanical calculators called arithmometers. They did not even have tracking and had to wait until it made a whole revolution over earth and appear again before they even knew that the launch was successful! In a hurry US launched a botched attempt which was immediately tagged as ‘kaputnik’ and ‘stayputnik’ by the merciless press.
Colussy tries to impress NASA to be a client.
In the meanwhile the astonishing story of Paul Gavin, who founded what became Motorola is narrated. He was a hustler more than anything else and failed in multiple businesses and went into multiple bankruptcies. Finally he stumbled into the radio business and the company became the dominant player in the car radio business. This is when he changed the name of the company from Galvin Manufacturing Company to Motorola, the ‘motor’ part referring to the cars and the ‘ola’ a blatant imitation of the big company of the time Victrola.
His son Bob Gavin played with governments through lobbying, changing rules to favour his company when he built it into an international giant.
Motorola also improved what was known as ‘Handie Talkie’. By converting to FM radio frequency and thus miniaturizing it, it invented the now famous ‘Walkie Talkie’. Fascinating tidbits like this are sprinkled all over the story. So what started out as a (could have been) boring Iridium story takes on multiple colours and facets and this takes the book to a much higher level.
For instance, they say how a glitch in the Motorola equipment elevated Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon more poetic than intended. Read to find out how.
The three engineers tucked away in a remote lab plan this Iridium, which Motorola normally does not even look at and therefore should have been rejected outright when they go for approval with the ‘corporate’.
More vignettes follow. Most of us know that PARC facility of Xerox invented many cool things that we take for granted today ; the graphics interface and the mouse being just two examples. But did you know that the Motorola lab invented the first devices which are today’s GPS, drones, and landing an aircraft remotely and all these inventions were rejected by the corporate filtering system? Wow.
More interesting is how big Motorola’s clout was in those days. It used to influence decisions of even foreign countries.
Only when Motorola’s fledgling attempts at Iridium were feared and vigorously opposed did Motorola itself throw its full weight behind the effort.
Also, we learn many other surprising facts buried in the flow of the story itself. I did not know that, Yuri Gagarin, who earned everlasting fame for being the first human ever to be in space belonged to Soviet military and died in a fighter jet training exercise due to an accident. Nor did I know that Russian rockets were considered to be vastly superior during Soviet times by the US Pentagon folks!
The facts about lingering superstitions in Russia are amusing too. Cosmonaut ritual included pissing on the rear right tire of the bus that took the flight crew to the launch pad. Every time.
He talks about how Al Gore wanted to be involved in every new technological innovation. Other trivia are hilarious. The US telescope in Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico is a very powerful one and ‘is so large and ominous looking that it doubled as a weapon of global destruction in the James Bond movie The Goldeneye’. The book is sprinkled with such nuggets.
How the times turn against them and how in spite of the Herculean efforts how there is initially no take up are well narrated.
The fall of Motorola (to Nokia, an up and coming cell phone company which bet on digital and Motorola stuck to analog for too long) and others in a swift and dramatic fashion is breathtakingly described.
Bin Laden empire (yes, they are related to the infamous Osama and yes, they are very big in Saudi industry) was a one eyed bricklayer who befriended King Abdul Aziz when Saudi Arabia was being forged through war and marriage and became a ‘royal builder’. He married twenty two times and begot fifty four children.
When Harlan abruptly backs out of the deal, the entire operation goes into a panic mode. When Motorola is defiant with the US government, no less, everyone turns against that company.
Now, other tidbits abound in passing : For instance we learn that Ugandan dictator Idi Amin once put out a contract on Colussy’s life after he cancelled a Pan Am 747 service out of Kampala!
How it was saved by the government is interesting. The further struggles make interesting reading, though you think that it just drags on and on. The audacity of Colussy in persisting and making the money needed (some of it, unbelievably, from Motorola itself) is nice.
The battle where the various government agencies fight like dogs for and against Iridium are good but a little tedious to read. Even though Colussy had to relive them all and it felt like he was in a groundhog day scenario where he had to make the same arguments to convince various players again and again, to a reader it looks like tedious detail. Could the author avoided it? Perhaps not, since the intensity of the battle and the twists and turns of the players involved may not have been brought out so starkly.
Yes, the story sags in places and it is difficult to keep the tempo always on the upside. But still it is a good read, all in all.
The epilog is brilliant, especially the description of the causes and the course of Motorola’s demise. It is these kind of fact based descriptions that the author excels at, and that makes what should have been a dry corporate struggle such an absorbing read. And the description of Ed Zanders, the zany CEO that they brought in from Sun Microsystems, is hilarious. He is gaffe prone and one of his quotes (to the press no less) was ‘I love my job. I hate my customers.’ He was featured in the list of ‘The top 10 worst CEOs’ that year in a business magazine article.
With such lovely tidbits and unswerving and great narration, the book captures interest and retains it throughout.
8/ 10
– – Krishna (Jan 2019)