“Let’s open the iPhone up, to discover its beginnings and evaluate its impact,” Merchant says, but goes on to do rather more. He provides pocket-sized histories of shatterproof glass, of popular photography, electronic music, apps that make farting noises, material on Apple Store employees’ productivity, and much else, all sprinkled with pointless facts. The amount of lithium used in iPhones is so tiny that Chile’s annual exports of the metal would be enough for 43 billion of them. More people work for Taiwanese iPhone assembler Foxconn than live in Estonia.

The camera wasn’t originally a priority, but Merchant can’t mention that without also talking about the history of selfies, about time spent in Paris with a professional iPhone-using photographer, and about the invention of image stabilisation.

He arranges for an iPhone to be atomised for the purpose of analysis, and lists the quantities and costs of each constituent element discovered. Doing the same to his book would reveal a high proportion of kitchen sink.

Despite much globe-trotting – from Bolivian tin mines via the atom-smashing facility at CERN to a cruise ship off Papua New Guinea – and much musing on the phone’s global impact, Merchant makes this a story of American enterprise, told in slangy magazine-style techno-argot, addressing an American mindset.

But the book is never dull. Considerable effort has gone into researching the phone from every possible angle and turning material on subjects as varied as office politics, software development and chemistry into a fast-paced and easily digestible read.