Earlier this month, three scientists got the Nobel prize in chemistry for inventing the lithium-ion battery.

“They created a rechargeable world,” reads the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences press release announcing the award.

Chances are, the phone that’s no more than a meter away from you, or on which you are reading these words, has a lithium battery in it, which is why the lithium-ion battery is so important: It made powerful electronic devices — like smartphones — portable in a way they hadn’t been before. This, in turn, set the stage for the smartphone revolution over the past decade and a half.

And the lithium-powered rise of the smartphone has had profound consequences, including political ones, because it’s largely through smartphones that internet browsing has permeated the world’s population at an unprecedented scale.