Stone-Ideas.com 
Have you, dear readers, ever heard of the chemical element indium? Probably not, and yet you may have a little of it in your hand right now: Your smartphone’s touchscreen has a thin coating of indium on the glass, and this substance makes it possible to swipe across the screen and click on programs.
More precisely: The coating is made of super-thin indium tin oxide. It is transparent, and when you touch a spot on the screen, the electric field changes. Sensors can measure the change, and your smartphone’s program can convert this signal into the desired action.
The National Museum of Natural History in the US capital Washington is hosting a must-see exhibition entitled “Cellphone: Unseen Connections“ about this modern generation of devices until the end of 2026.
Of course, you can also visit the exhibition virtually.
The museum, a department of the Smithsonian Institution, which focuses on knowledge transfer, not only provides technical descriptions, but also analyzes the significance of these contemporary wonder machines for the world:
* Globalization in its purest form: For the first time in human history, everyone has the same device in their hand or pocket.
* In the world’s poorer countries, the smartphone is catapulting people into the present of the industrialized world: For poor small farmers in the Sahel region, there is information on adapted agriculture and online advice on microcredit. Elsewhere in Africa, children can participate in learning programs instead of being content with what their village school offers. Telemedicine now plays an important role in healthcare, and much more.
From the perspective of technological history, this means that the smartphone allows poor countries to leapfrog: They skip the wiring and mobile phone phases and land in the era of mobile computers and the internet.
Many such development approaches are described in a report by the Berlin Institute for Population and Development. Their success is also due to the fact that Africa has the youngest population and that children are notoriously unafraid of these devices.
Back to the exhibition. It poses provocative questions such as “What does your cellphone mean to you?”
Using 750 objects, a graphic novel on the walls, and numerous installations, the “unknown connections” from the show’s title are demonstrated: access to information or to people anywhere on the globe. The impact of the devices on the environment is also examined.
Consequently, materials play an important role in the exhibition. There are more than 65 minerals, most of them substances that occur only in small quantities in the Earth’s crust.
The podcast accompanying the exhibition discusses the topic of recycling in detail. At one point, it states, “Everything in your cellphone is extracted from the Earth,“ and at another, humanity’s connection to nature is summed up: “Everything we use in our lives is either grown or mined.“
“We can be better users and take more care,“ is one plea.
The current US administration is probably not enthusiastic about such statements, as we suspect from the messages on our smartphone.
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
