Tim Harford

speaker

411 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 6d ago

Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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It's a slim, glazed rectangle.

No buttons, just a touchscreen.

And its functions?

A phone, a messaging device, a portable television, a portable games console.

You could even use it to book a plane ticket.

It was 1989.

Most mobile phones were the size of bricks.

Apple's new portable computer weighed 16 pounds.

There was no World Wide Web.

And Mark Peratt had just imagined the iPhone.

I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

Peratt called his idea the pocket crystal.

He imagined that people would carry them everywhere.

It would be small, intimate, like jewellery.

You'd wear it all the time, he explained.

And if there was a fire in your house, you'd think, family goes first, and then I grab my pocket crystal.

Peratt wasn't just a visionary.

He was an evangelist and a brilliant one at that.

He showed his idea to a colleague called Bill Atkinson.

Atkinson called his friend Andy Hertzfeld.

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