The First Touchscreen Wasn't Apple, It Was Made in 1965

The iPhone did not invent the touchscreen. It popularized one. The technology Apple built its 2007 launch around was 42 years old, first described in an obscure paper by a British electronics engineer whose job was making radar consoles easier for Royal Air Force operators to use.

“Johnson wasn't trying to build a consumer device. He was solving a military problem: how to make radar operators interact with screens more intuitively.”

That paper, published in October 1965 by Eric Arthur Johnson of the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, England, is the earliest clear description of a capacitive touchscreen — the exact type of sensor in every modern smartphone, tablet, and touchscreen laptop. The technology existed, in working prototype form, before the moon landing. It took two generations to reach mass consumers.

THE RADAR PROBLEM

In the mid-1960s, the Royal Radar Establishment (RRE) was the UK's lead government laboratory for radar and military signal processing. Its staff had pioneered chain home radar during World War II, built the first working solid-state radar receivers in the 1950s, and by the 1960s were working on next-generation air traffic control systems.

Air traffic controllers had a specific interaction problem. They watched radar screens showing dozens of aircraft tracks moving in real time. To identify, reassign, or hand off a track, they needed to reference it — but the available input devices (keyboards, trackballs, light pens) required looking away from the screen, reaching for a separate input device, and mentally translating coordinates. It was slow and error-prone.

Johnson asked an obvious question: could the controller simply touch the track on the screen with a finger?

His October 1965 paper in Electronics Letters, titled 'Touch Display — A Novel Input/Output Device for Computers,' described a system in which copper wires were arranged in an X-Y grid behind the glass of a CRT display. A fingertip touching the screen altered the capacitance at that point in the grid, which the system could measure and translate into screen coordinates. The entire idea — conductive wire arrays, capacitive sensing, finger as the input — is essentially how 2026 smartphones work.

Johnson published two follow-up papers in 1967 and 1969 with more detailed schematics and prototype measurements. By 1969, an experimental touch-controlled radar display was operating at RRE.

THE DETOUR THROUGH EDUCATION: PLATO IV

The first commercial-scale touchscreen deployment was not military. It was educational. Starting in 1972, the PLATO IV system at the University of Illinois — a pioneering computer-based education platform — shipped thousands of terminals with infrared-grid touchscreens. PLATO IV terminals let students tap directly on lesson materials, drawings, and multiple-choice answers. The infrared approach used light beams rather than capacitive sensing, but the principle of finger input on a display was the same. At its peak, PLATO IV operated over 1,000 terminals at universities and training centers globally.

THE TORONTO MULTITOUCH BREAKTHROUGH

In 1982, Nimish Mehta, a graduate student in Bill Buxton's research group at the University of Toronto, built the first multi-touch system. The prototype used a camera pointed at a frosted glass panel from behind. Multiple fingers pressing against the glass created distinct bright spots visible to the camera, which the computer interpreted as separate input points. The same year, researchers at Bell Labs built a capacitive multi-touch device independently.

These research systems defined the gestures — pinch to zoom, two-finger rotate, multi-point selection — that became the signature interactions of every modern touchscreen device. Every gesture that feels natural on an iPhone was first demonstrated in a university lab in the early 1980s.

CONSUMER COMMERCIALIZATION, SLOWLY

The first touchscreen consumer phone was the IBM Simon, shipped in 1994. Simon had a resistive (not capacitive) touchscreen, a stylus, email capability, and cost $899 ($1,900 in 2026 dollars). It sold roughly 50,000 units before being discontinued. It predated the iPhone by 13 years and is often cited as the first smartphone in any meaningful sense.

Resistive touchscreens — which detect pressure rather than electrical capacitance — dominated through the 1990s and early 2000s. They worked with styluses, fingernails, or gloved hands, but had poorer image quality and lower durability than capacitive screens. The Palm Pilot, most early PDAs, and most early touchscreen kiosks used resistive sensing.

The shift to capacitive touch in consumer electronics traces to FingerWorks, a Delaware startup founded in 1998 by Wayne Westerman and John Elias. FingerWorks built capacitive multi-touch trackpads that could recognize gestures. Apple acquired FingerWorks in 2005 and used its technology as the foundation of the iPhone's touchscreen, released June 29, 2007.

WHY IT MATTERS

The iPhone's commercial success obscures how much prior art it sat on top of. E.A. Johnson's 1965 capacitive sensing. The 1972 PLATO IV infrared grids. The 1982 Toronto multi-touch work. The 1994 IBM Simon. The 1998 FingerWorks gestural trackpads. Every major component of the iPhone's touch interaction had been demonstrated in a research lab or a failed commercial product before Steve Jobs walked on stage at Macworld 2007.

This is the common pattern for 'revolutionary' technology. The technical discovery tends to precede the mass-market product by 20 to 40 years, and the successful company is the one that integrates, polishes, and correctly times the consumer launch — not the one that made the original breakthrough. Johnson never commercialized his invention. RRE did not patent it meaningfully. The UK let the technology drift into the public domain while Apple built a multi-trillion-dollar business on top of the same principles.

Today, approximately 15 billion touchscreen devices are in use globally, almost all using capacitive sensing descended directly from Johnson's 1965 design. Every tap on a phone screen is a signal being routed through a wire grid whose physics was worked out to help British air traffic controllers point at airplanes during the Cold War.

(Sources: E.A. Johnson, 'Touch Display — A Novel Input/Output Device for Computers,' Electronics Letters, October 1965; E.A. Johnson, 'Touch Displays: A Programmed Man-Machine Interface,' Ergonomics, 1967; Bill Buxton, 'Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known and Loved,' Microsoft Research archive; University of Illinois PLATO project archive; Steve Jobs, iPhone introduction keynote, January 9, 2007; Apple Inc. 10-K filings; IBM Simon user manual, 1994)