We all know iPhones soak up a lot of power, yet they’d be nowhere without the rechargeable lithium battery.īritish scientist Stanley Whittingham created the very first example of the lithium battery while working in a lab for ExxonMobil in the ‘70s, carrying forward research he’d initially conducted with colleagues at Stanford University. Johnson may have taken the first step, and Apple harnessed its potential, but we owe touch-screen technology to the collective efforts of numerous researchers all over the world.īattery Low. Conservatively extrapolating such figures across the two hundred articles cited by Apple tallies to over a thousand researchers, each making their important contribution to this area of touch-screen technology. Six authors and two blind peer reviewers are acknowledged. Consider one article on touch-screen technology recently published by Elsevier’s Information Sciences journal. Each had their article independently evaluated by at least one external academic in the peer- review process that sits at the core of academic research. Many were awarded a grant for their research. One Apple patent on touch-screen technology cites over 200 scientific peer-reviewed articles, published by a range of academic societies, commercial publishers and university presses. The University of Cambridge, for example, recently spun out a limited company to secure further investment for their own research on touch-screen technology, successfully closing a $5.5m investment round backed by venture capitalists from the U.K. Since Johnson’s first leap forward, billions of dollars have been awarded to research on touch-screen technology-from public bodies and private investors alike, with one often leading to the other. The 1969 patent that followed has now been cited across a whole host of famous inventions-including Apple’s 1997 patent for “ a portable computer handheld cellular telephone.” His 1965 article, “ Touch display-a novel input/output device for computers" continues to be cited by researchers to this day. While the Righteous Brothers were losing that lovin’ feeling, Johnson was publishing his findings in an Electronics Letters article p ublished by th e Institution of Engineering and Technology. The first touch screen was actually invented way back in the 1960s by Eric Arthur Johnson, a radar engineer working at a government research center in the U.K. The iPhone wouldn’t be the iPhone without its iconic touch-screen technology. To demonstrate this, here’s a closer look at just three of the research breakthroughs that underpin the iPhone. Each was the result of countless researchers, universities, funders, governments and private companies layering one innovation on top of another. But there were hundreds of research breakthroughs and innovations without which the iPhone would not even be possible. The relentless drive and ingenuity of the many teams at Apple cannot be doubted. The hidden story of the iPhone is a testament to this. We will need to harness the fundamental principle underpinning all research-to stand on the shoulders of giants, with each new breakthrough building on the work of others before it. These challenges are too complex, interconnected and fast-moving to be solved by any one person, idea, organization or nation. Yet the challenges the world faces-energy crises, food shortages, climate change, overpopulation-require collaboration and cooperation from all of us, both as global citizens and nations. In educational terms, a whole generation is growing up on inspirational YouTube videos revering individualism and some troubling leadership traits (see here for the darker side of Jobs and Apple). These heroic narratives are both factually incorrect and unhelpful. Steve Jobs and his team at Apple invented the iPhone. Mark Zuckerberg pioneered the social network. Elon Musk revolutionized the electric car. The great man theory has crept back into popular culture in recent years, repurposed for the world of entrepreneurs, tech start-ups and digital conglomerates.
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