If you have tens of thousands of things to
control, you need tens of thousands at least
of buttons if not knobs to turn.
10,000 is a hundred times a hundred and you
begin to get a very large and confusing panel
of buttons
You need a system in which you zoom in on
the problem you’re currently solving and
temporarily obscure everything else.
Frank Beck and technician Bent Stumpe get
to work on a solution.
They call it the touch screen.
The idea has been tried before.
But not like this.
With multi-use buttons activated by the electric
charge within a human finger.
One of the very first things a child can do
is to point.
So it’s a very natural sort of thing to
point at the thing you want and to get the
answer immediately.
If you could have a central button system
which is the touch screen then the man could
be sitting there and just by pointing to a
device he could address any equipment in the
machine.
They etch tiny wires onto the back of their
screens.
Wires that detect the human touch.
It’s an idea that’s still in use in modern
smartphones.
One electrode if you like is the pair of wires
printed on a screen.
And the other one is your finger, you bring
a finger up to it and to complete the capacitive
circuit.
By 1976 the Synchrotron Particle Accelerator
goes online - controlled by the power of human
touch.
When the thing was finally working I came
and looked at it and I touched the thing.
And it was – I can’t describe to you how
exciting it was, it’s like writing a poem
and suddenly hearing it recited by somebody,
it was absolutely wonderful.
I didn’t realize that there would be a million
of them, I didn’t realize that I would own
one in my motorcar and another one in my pocket,
but I did realize that we’d gone onto something
great.
