Once upon a time, the way to get a computer to do something useful was to feed it a stack of cards

with holes punched into them.

Thankfully, things soon moved on and, by the end of the 20th century, you could get a computer to do
things simply by pointing and clicking with a keyboard and a mouse. But the real revolution in making
computers easy to use has happened only in the last decade or so—with the arrival of touch-sensitive
screens.

Most smartphones, ebook readers, and some MP3 players already work with simple, touch controls—
and some laptops work that way too.

Touchscreens are intuitively easy to use, but how exactly do they work?
 A TOUCHSCREEN is a bit like an invisible keyboard glued to the front of your computer
monitor. To understand how it works, it helps if you know something about how an ordinary
keyboard works first.

Essentially, every key on a keyboard is an electrical switch. When you push a key down, you
complete an electric circuit and a current flows. The current varies according to the key you
press and that's how your computer figures out what you're typing.
Photo: This is the sensitive, switch layer from inside a
typical PC keyboard. It rests under the keys and detects
when you press them. There are three separate layers of
plastic here. Two of them are covered in electrically
conducting metal tracks and there's an insulating layer
between them with holes in it. The dots you can see are
places where the keys press the two conducting layers
together. The lines are electrical connections that allow
tiny electric currents to flow when the layers are pressed
tightly together.
 In a bit more detail, here's what happens. Inside a keyboard, you'll find there are two layers of electrically
conducting plastic separated by an insulating plastic membrane with holes in it. In fact, there's one hole
underneath each key. When you press a key, you push the top conductor layer down towards the bottom layer, so
the two layers meet and touch through the hole. A current flows between the layers and the computer knows
you've pressed a key. Little springy pieces of rubber underneath each key make them bounce back to their original
position, breaking the circuit when you release them.

Touchscreens have to achieve something similar to this on the surface on your computer screen. Obviously,
they can't use switches, membranes, and bits of plastic or they'd block the view of the screen below. So, they have
to use more cunning tricks for sensing your touch—completely invisibly!
Different kinds of touchscreen work in different ways. Some can sense only one
finger at a time and get extremely confused if you try to press in two places at
once. Others can easily detect and distinguish more than one key press at once.
These are some of the main technologies:

• RESISTIVE • INFRARED
• CAPACITIVE • SURFACE ACOUSTIC WAVE
Resistive touchscreens (currently the most popular technology) work a bit like "transparent
keyboards" overlaid on top of the screen. There's a flexible upper layer of conducting polyester plastic
bonded to a rigid lower layer of conducting glass and separated by an insulating membrane. When
you press on the screen, you force the polyester to touch the glass and complete a circuit—just like
pressing the key on a keyboard. A chip inside the screen figures out the coordinates of the place you
touched.

When you press a resistive touchscreen,

you push two conducting layers together,
so they make contact, a bit like an
ordinary computer keyboard.
These screens are made from multiple layers of glass. The inner layer conducts electricity and so does the outer
layer, so effectively the screen behaves like two electrical conductors separated by an insulator—in other words, a
capacitor. When you bring your finger up to the screen, you alter the electrical field by a certain amount that
varies according to where your hand is. Capacitive screens can be touched in more than one place at once. Unlike
most other types of touchscreen, they don't work if you touch them with a plastic stylus (because the plastic is an
insulator and stops your hand from affecting the electric field).

In a capacitive touchscreen, the whole

screen is like a capacitor. When you
bring your finger up close, you affect the
electric field that exists between the
inner and outer glass.
Just like the magic eye beams in an intruder alarm, an infrared touchscreen uses a grid pattern of LEDs and light-
detector photocells arranged on opposite sides of the screen. The LEDs shine infrared light in front of the
screen—a bit like an invisible spider's web. If you touch the screen at a certain point, you interrupt two or more
beams. A microchip inside the screen can calculate where you touched by seeing which beams you interrupted.
The touchscreen on Sony Reader ebooks (like the one pictured in our photo below) works this way. Since you're
interrupting a beam, infrared screens work just as well whether you use your finger or a stylus.

An infrared touchscreen uses the same

magic-eye technology that Tom Cruise
had to dodge in the movie Mission
Impossible. When your fingers move up
close, they break invisible beams that
pass over the surface of the screen
between LEDs on one side and
photocells on the other.
Surprisingly, this touchscreen technology detects your fingers using sound instead of
light. Ultrasonic sound waves (too high pitched for humans to hear) are generated at the
edges of the screen and reflected back and forth across its surface. When you touch the
screen, you interrupt the sound beams and absorb some of their energy. The screen's
microchip controller figures out from this where exactly you touched the screen.

A surface-acoustic wave screen is a bit

like an infrared screen, but your finger
interrupts high-frequency sound beams
rippling over the surface instead of
invisible light beams.
All of us with smartphones, ebook readers, and tablet computers are familiar with touchscreen
technology, but touch-based PCs and laptops are still fairly uncommon. Way back in 2008, Microsoft
announced that touch technologies would feature prominently in future versions of the Windows
operating system—potentially making computer mice and keyboards obsolete. Four years later, it
unveiled its Surface range of laptops with smart built-in touchscreens, but sales have been
consistently disappointing.

Photo: Touchscreens are far from

perfect. That's why many people use
full-sized Bluebooth keyboards with their
tablets and phones.
Though most of us happily swipe away at our smartphones and tablets every day of our lives, when it comes to
work, we're still largely locked into our old-style desktop computers and operating systems, and the old ways of
using them—namely keyboards and mice. In other words, it's important to recognize that touch technology makes
more sense for some applications than others.
It's great to point and click on a smartphone app when you're doing something as simple as ordering a pizza or
checking your bank balance, but if you want to edit an essay, write complex computer code, debug a broken
website, or anything that requires quite a lot of fiddly input, touchscreen interfaces can slow you down and
frustrate you: they're just too clumsy and imprecise.
Most of us who write a lot will find an ordinary computer keyboard far quicker and more accurate than the pop-
up keyboards on tablets and smartphones—and it's telling that so many people find the need to improve their
phones using plug-in keyboards. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, touchscreen devices need to be
optimized for those applications where they make most sense. Keyboards, mice, pen tablets, joysticks, speech
recognition, and other forms of input will continue to work happily alongside them for many years to come.