In 1971, Steve Wozniak’s mother mailed him a magazine article. It was from Esquire. The headline: “Secrets of the Little Blue Box.” Fourteen pages about a group of underground hackers called phone phreaks who had figured out how to hack AT&T’s entire phone network using nothing but audio tones. The most famous of them was a man named John Draper, Captain Crunch, who had discovered that a toy whistle found in a Cap’n Crunch cereal box produced exactly the 2600-hertz tone AT&T used to control its long-distance lines. One whistle. Free calls anywhere on earth. Wozniak read the article and called his friend Steve Jobs. Jobs was 16. Wozniak was 21. They both assumed it was fiction. The technical detail was too precise, too specific. Nobody could actually do this. So they drove to the Stanford Linear Accelerator library and looked up the frequencies themselves in an AT&T technical manual. It was real. Wozniak built the device. Jobs sold it for $150 each, mostly to college students and people in dorms. They made $6,000 total... their first product, their first partnership, their first taste of what it felt like to go up against a corporation and win. Then Wozniak called the Vatican from a payphone, pretended to be Henry Kissinger, and asked to speak to the Pope. Just to see if it worked. There was one night a police officer spotted them in a parking lot with the device and asked what it was. Wozniak’s hands were shaking. Jobs slid the blue box into his pocket and kept talking like nothing had happened. Jobs said later: “If it hadn’t been for the blue boxes, there would have been no Apple. Woz and I learned that we could take on large companies and beat them.” The company that eventually put a phone in every pocket on earth started with two teenagers and a toy whistle from a cereal box.