History of the iPhone | Who invented the first iPhone?, When was first iPhone invented?

Foysol Islam 11/16/2023

Invented the world's first iPhone

History of the iPhone | Who invented the first iPhone?, When was first iPhone invented?

When was the iPhone first invented

The Great Man Theory has returned to popular culture in recent years, reclaimed for entrepreneurs, tech start-ups and digital conglomerates. Elon Musk revolutionized the electric car. Mark Zuckerberg is the pioneer of social networks. Apple's Steve Jobs and his team invented the iPhone.
These heroic narratives are both factually inaccurate and unhelpful.

On the educational side, an entire generation is growing up on inspirational YouTube videos that extol individualism and some troubling leadership traits (see Jobs and the dark side of Apple here). Yet the challenges facing the world—energy crises, food shortages, climate change, overpopulation—require cooperation and collaboration from all of us, both global citizens and nations. These challenges are too complex, interconnected and fast-moving to be solved by any one person, idea, organization or nation. We must employ the basic principle of all research – standing on the shoulders of giants, building on the work of others before each new breakthrough. The hidden story of the iPhone is proof of this.


The relentless drive and ingenuity of many of Apple's teams cannot be doubted. But there were hundreds of research advances and innovations without which even the iPhone would not be possible. Each was the result of countless researchers, universities, funders, governments, and private organizations layering one innovation on top of another.

To demonstrate this, here's a closer look at just three of the iPhone's key research breakthroughs.

touch screen

An iPhone wouldn't be an iPhone without its iconic touch-screen technology.
The first touch screen was actually invented by Eric Arthur Johnson, a radar engineer working at a UK government research center in the 1960s. While the religious brothers were losing that love, Johnson was publishing his findings in an Electronics Letters article published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology. His 1965 paper, "Touch Display—A Novel Input/Output Device for Computers" is still cited by researchers today. A later 1969 patent is cited across a host of now-famous inventions—including Apple's 1997 patent for "a portable computer handheld cellular telephone."

Since Johnson's first success, billions of dollars have been paid for research into touch-screen technology—from government agencies and private investors, one often leading to the other. For example, the University of Cambridge recently formed a limited company to secure further investment for their own research on touch-screen technology, successfully closing a $5.5 million investment backed by venture capitalists from the UK and China.

Was iPhone the first phone

An Apple patent on touch-screen technology cites more than 200 scientific peer-reviewed articles published by various academic societies, commercial publishers, and university presses. These authors did not work alone. Most were part of a research team. Many were awarded grants for their research. Each article has been independently assessed by at least one external academic in a peer-review process at the core of academic research. Consider an article on touch-screen technology recently published by Elsevier's Journal of Information Sciences.

Six authors and two blinded peer reviewers are acknowledged. Extrapolating such figures conservatively, Apple cites over a thousand researchers in over two hundred articles, each making significant contributions to this area of touch-screen technology.

Johnson may have taken the first step and Apple exploited its potential, but we owe touch-screen technology to the combined efforts of countless researchers around the world.

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Battery charge is low. Blink blink. We all know that iPhones absorb a lot of power, yet they wouldn't be anywhere without rechargeable lithium batteries.

British scientist Stanley Whittingham created the first example of a lithium battery while working in a lab at ExxonMobil in the 70s, which he first ran with colleagues at Stanford University. Previous research had already indicated that lithium could be used to store energy, but it was Whittingham and his team who discovered how to do it at room temperature - without the risk of explosion (note Samsung).

John Goodenough, a professor at Oxford University, then improved on Whittingham's original work by using metal oxides to increase performance. This led to increased interest from Sony, which became the first company to commercialize lithium batteries in the 1990s and launched a lithium-powered cell phone in Japan in 1991. All of these provided the basis for widespread use when Apple first properly forced them. Launched the iPhone in 2007 to more than a million users.

The lithium story doesn't stop there. As one of the world's building blocks without fossil fuels, its production is secured with initiatives. So who do you think bought Sony's battery business in 2016? Why, one of Apple's main suppliers no less, Murata Manufacturing. Meanwhile, John Goodenough, now 95, continues his groundbreaking research. Just a few months ago, he published a groundbreaking study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Among its claims? That Goodenough has developed a lithium battery for electric cars that can be used 23 times longer than the current average.

Internet and World Wide Web

When Apple engineer Andy Grignon added the first Internet functionality to an iPod in 2004, Steve Jobs wasn't too enthusiastic: “It's bullshit. I don't want it. I know it works, I got it, great, thanks, but it's a crappy experience."

The painstaking work of multiple Apple teams took a "small experience" and transformed it into something revolutionary - all the collective human experience and knowledge right there, in your back pocket, at your fingertips. But who do we have to thank for this?

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is widely credited with inventing the World Wide Web. His work began in 1980 while at the European Organization for Nuclear Research. Better known by its French acronym, CERN was founded in 1952 by 12 European governments and continues to be funded by its member states. Berners-Lee's ideas began as a proposed solution to a very specific problem at CERN: a way to share and update the vast amounts of information and data used by CERN researchers.

His proposal was based on the concept of hypertext, a term first coined by theoretical pioneer Ted Nelson in a 1965 paper published by the Association for Computing Machinery. Often compared to an electronic version of the footnote system used by researchers around the world, hypertext underpins the Web, enabling you to jump from one source of information to another. Anywhere on the Internet. Whatever form it takes.

But Berners-Lee cannot be singled out for achievement. If the World Wide Web is a map, then the Internet is the landscape we navigate: a networking infrastructure that connects millions of computers worldwide, enabling each to communicate with others, transferring vast amounts of information.

We have to go back to 1965 to find the origins of the Internet. While Nelson was developing hypertext and Eric was inventing the touch screen, two MIT researchers, Thomas Merrill and Lawrence Roberts, connected their computers using a common 3,000 miles away in California. Low-speed dial-up telephone lines. Shortly after that came ARPANET, not the dystopian AI system, but the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. ARPANET was founded and funded by DARPA, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and was initially conceived as a way to interconnect US military computers across their various regional hubs.

In a moment described below by Leonard Kleinrock, it was the ARPANET that really gave birth to the Internet. It's October 1969, three months after men walked on the moon, and Kleinrock and his colleagues have connected multiple computers across the United States:

We typed L and asked on the phone.

Do you see L?

Yes, we see El

We typed O, and we asked, do you see the O?

Yes, we see O.

Then we typed G and the system crashed…

The road to true innovation never runs smoothly. But these early advances in the space age were the foundation for what was to follow. Although the modern iPhone is now 120 million times more powerful than the computer that took Apollo 11 to the moon, its real power lies in its ability to consume the billions of websites and terabytes that make up the Internet.

The evolution of Apple's iPhone

A brief analysis of these three research advances reveals a research web of over 400,000 publications since Apple first published their phone patent in 1997. Add the factor of supporting researchers, funders, universities and organizations behind them and the contributor network is simply amazing and we've barely scratched the surface. There are countless other research breakthroughs without which the iPhone would not be possible. Some are well known, others less so. Both GPS and Siri have their origins in the US military, when the complex algorithms that enable digitization were initially conceived to detect nuclear tests. Their original research was.

The iPhone is an era-defining technology. Era-defining technologies come not from the rare brilliance of one person or organization, but from the level of innovation and decades of research, with thousands of individuals and organizations standing on each other's shoulders looking into the future. In our age of seemingly insurmountable global challenges, we must not only remember this but be inspired by it.


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