To many retailers, using touch screen till systems may seem like a relatively novel innovation. While people will be familiar with them in stores of various sizes these days, only millennials and generation Z consumers will not recall a time when they were nowhere to be seen and everyone queued at the till.

The same may be said of all sorts of other uses of touch screens, from cashpoints to ticket machines, not to mention mobile phones.

Few might imagine that this technology actually dates back as far as the 1960s, at a time when the computers used by NASA to guide its Apollo lunar missions had less computing power than one of today’s smartphones.

The man credited with the invention was E.A. Johnson at the Royal Radar Establishment in Malvern, Worcestershire, round 1965. Nobody was thinking of shopping tills at the time; this system was devised for potential use in air traffic control systems.

It was in the 1970s that the technology started to become more widely used. In 1973, Dr Sam Hurst from the University of Kentucky invented what he called the Elograph, which the university patented. It was seen as a major step forward in the technology, but did not feature a transparent screen. However, Dr Hurst and his team reduced their first transparent touch screen in 1974.

The actual term ‘touch screen’ was first used three years later, when Siemens funded a venture by Elographics, the company founded by Dr Hurst and the university, to create the first curved screen device. 

From here, it was just a matter of time before these screens would be used in a growing number of places. The first mobile phone with one was actually created in the 1980s, an age when those old enough to remember will recall most mobiles were like bricks.

As with so many features of modern technology, there is a generation now emerging that has never known anything else. Older consumers will recall a different time, but few may have realised just how long ago touch screens were actually first in use.