The finger-operated touchscreen was born in a British radar lab, not Silicon Valley
Decades before smartphones, Eric Johnson at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, England, built a screen that responded to a bare fingertip. He described his capacitive design briefly in 1965 and in full in 1967, with air traffic control in mind. Swiping and tapping, it turns out, began as tools for guiding aircraft.
Germany pursued the same goal. At Telefunken in Konstanz, Rainer Mallebrein's team built an ultrasonic pointing device for air traffic control and, by 1970, a touch input unit using conductively coated glass in front of the display, patented in 1971. Even earlier, a 1946 Philco patent described a stylus that let sports broadcasters sketch arrows and circles over live television pictures.
A key step came from CERN. Engineers Frank Beck and Bent Stumpe developed a transparent touchscreen that went into service in 1973, followed by versions that could sense a finger through a thin insulating film. A paper that year noted it could register several touches at once, but the software deliberately switched that off. The University of Toronto demonstrated camera-based multi-touch in 1982 and a capacitive multi-touch tablet in 1985.
Early consumer attempts were bumpy. The 1985 to 1989 Buick Riviera replaced many dashboard controls with a monochrome touchscreen, which flopped amid technical glitches and drivers' unease with the technology. Screens also had a reputation for sloppiness until 1988, when researchers at the University of Maryland introduced a lift-off strategy: the action fired only when the finger left the glass, so users could slide into position first and hit targets as small as a single pixel. That lab's touchscreen slider later surfaced as prior art in lock-screen patent battles.
Mass adoption followed quickly once costs fell. IBM's Simon of 1993 is widely considered the first touchscreen phone, and the Nintendo DS brought touch to gaming in 2004. The LG Prada, released in May 2007, beat the first iPhone as the first phone with a capacitive screen, and by late 2009 most smartphones shipped without physical keypads.
Source: Touchscreen
