A dozen years ago touchscreen pioneer David Caldwell narrowly missed a chance to revolutionise consumer electronics. Can his latest invention bring redemption?
In the early 2000s, engineer David Caldwell might have missed the chance of a lifetime. While developing touch-sensitive switches for home appliances, Caldwell was invited to Cupertino, California to demonstrate his patented TouchSensor technology to Apple, which was looking to replace the mechanical scroll wheel in the original iPod. After peppering him with questions about how it worked, an Apple engineer asked, “Can you integrate it into a round wheel?” Sure, replied Caldwell.
But nothing ever came of the discussion, partly because Illinois-based Gemtron, the glass company that controlled his technology, wasn’t interested in diversifying beyond its core expertise: selling $100 cooktops embedded with electronics to companies like General Electric, Whirlpool and Electrolux. Apple, of course, found another way to make its touch wheel. Some 400 million units and $67.5 billion in sales later, it is still in use on the iPod Classic.
Who knows what might have happened if the talks continued? Caldwell, now 58, his round face framed by shaggy bangs and rectangular glasses, tries not to dwell on the missed opportunity. “You can’t look back,” he says, sitting in a nondescript office-park laboratory in Michigan. “I did okay.”
Caldwell holds over 30 patents, many on touch technology. His TouchSensor switches have been incorporated into millions of control panels, for everything from automobiles to washing machines to beverage dispensers at fast-food joints. Still, when Gemtron sold TouchSensor to another firm in 2007 for just $65 million, Caldwell opted to strike out on his own. Less than a year later he formed a new company, AlSentis, to reinvent touch technology once again.
The result, eight years later, is a potential breakthrough that could transform how people interact with their electronic devices. Called HSS (Heuristic Signature Sensing), Caldwell’s patented setup is more reliable and uses far less energy than today’s touch systems. It even works when wet or dirty, and can be operated with gloves on. “From what I’ve seen,” says Bruce Banter, president of Tech-D-P in Plymouth, Michigan, an expert in automotive touch controls, “there’s nobody even close”. Most touch-sensitive products, like those used in the iPhone, are ‘capacitive systems’. They sense when and where an object—typically a finger—breaks an electric field. To trigger a touch signal, engineers set a very thin threshold, just above the surface of the device, to measure capacitive change. That’s why a light touch is all that’s needed to operate a smartphone. But environmental factors can wreak havoc with capacitive systems: Who hasn’t accidentally butt-dialled someone or struggled in vain to make a call with wet hands or with gloves on?
(This story appears in the 12 June, 2015 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)