Special edition: Hidden Heroes

Are you scrolling through this newsletter? Or your mailbox?

You will be using your mouse or multi-touch interface for that – they are so everyday that we’re all used to them.

Regarding the inventor, we might all look towards Steve Jobs.

But three men, over 40 years, combined an idea, executed it, and changed it into something more innovative and valuable.

Meet Sam Hurst, Jeff Han, and Ken Kocienda – the three Hidden Heroes of the multi-touch interface. 

The multi-touch interface turns out to be an excellent illustration of simultaneous discovery, a phenomenon that has long been noted in the history of innovation.

Several innovative concepts, technologies, or scientific discoveries come together, and suddenly, a large group of people pursues the same concept independently.

It started when Dr. Sam Hurst created the Elograph, an electronic device that uses a coordinate measuring system to read data from charts.

More than forty years later, a prototype created by Jeff Han's research team at NYU included some of the crucial interactions that would later become commonplace: pinching or expanding two fingers to zoom in or out on a photo and dragging icons by touching the screen and sliding your finger across the surface.

While Jeff Han was working on the prototype, another company called Fingerworks was acquired by Apple, and the secret project “Purple” was launched. We all saw the results in 2007 during an Apple live event, and the man behind it was named Ken Kocienda. 

Thanks to their pioneering work, we live in a world where touching is believing.

How?

That's the story.

Read the new Hidden Heroes release here: The Long Road to Multitouch