touchscreen

Touch comes from Old French tochier, from a Germanic root related to Proto-Germanic *tukkan, meaning to pull or tug. Screen derives from Old French escren, meaning a shield or a curtain used as a partition. Both words are medieval: a screen was a physical barrier against fire, wind, or sight; touching was the most immediate of the senses. The compound touchscreen simply describes the action the device enables.

E.A. Johnson's 1965 research paper 'Touch Display — A Novel Input/Output Device for Computers' described a capacitive touchscreen. Johnson installed one of the first working prototypes at London Heathrow Airport in 1972, for air traffic control. It responded to single touches only. Multi-touch — the pinch-and-zoom that defines modern smartphones — required a different technology developed by researchers at the University of Toronto in 1982 and later at Bell Labs.

Steve Jobs did not invent the touchscreen, but he correctly identified it as the interface that would make computers intimate. When Apple engineers demonstrated the multi-touch prototype to Jobs in 2003, he reportedly said: 'This is the future.' The iPhone in 2007 was the first mass-market device to make glass the primary human-computer interface.

Today touchscreens handle more interactions than keyboards and mice combined. The ancient sense of touch — the most primitive and immediate sense, the one we use before language — now operates software. The medieval screen, originally a barrier against fire, became a surface for human fingers.