CNET UK's Drew Stearne created the video below, a dynamic animation that shows the history of the iPhone. It shows quite clearly how the iPhone came about not as something fully formed from the void but as a consolidation and refinement of existing technologies, many of which have been around for decades. Stearne created the video as a tribute to Steve Jobs.
The video is embedded below. Note that parts of it are very information-dense, so you might have to freeze-frame some parts of it if you want to grasp all the little factoids that fly past in less than four minutes. Aside from that, it's a great video that perfectly encapsulates the iPhone's long history -- a history that began not in 2007, but long before many of us were even born.
