Not a bit of it. The miracle happens much closer to home. My phone is a radio transmitter with a very limited range. The call that I make despatches a series of electrical pulses to a receiver standing on the roof of a nearby building. This makes automatic contact with another receiver a few miles away, and so it goes on.
An interconnected web of ground-transmitters sends my voice racing across the country, leaping along motorways, bouncing over skyscrapers, scurrying around hill ranges and chasing the length of green valleys.
Satellites don't come into it. The challenge for those who created the network was to cover the whole of Britain with as few transmitters as possible. The chapter reads rather like a sitcom, with teams of engineers in white vans fanning out across the motorway system making random phone calls to check the strength of the signal.
Not all these success stories have happy endings. The chapter on video games tells the amazing story of Ian Bell and David Braben. These were the original teenagers-in-the-attic who managed to earn a software fortune while their mums supplied them with cocoa and biccies. In the early Eighties they both became fascinated by a prototype PC known as the BBC Microcomputer.
They put in long hours in the evenings and at weekends and, after 18 months of labour, they came up with the groundbreaking Elite computer game set in Outer Space. It became an instant success, eventually selling 150,000 units.
This figure matches the number of Microcomputers in existence at the time. So although the statistics seem small, the scale of their success is almost incredible: total market saturation achieved by two students tinkering in their spare time.
Since their initial breakthrough, Bell and Braben have grown apart. They spent most of the Nineties in legal disputes with each other. Braben is still developing games and searching for a success to rival Elite.
Bell spends his time practising aikido and rearing pedigree Burmese cats. He avoids modern computer games. 'Too obvious, too violent,' he says.
As Spufford poignantly comments: 'He doesn't much like the world he helped to create.'
