MITTENS AND TOUCH SCREENS

According to this article in the Economist, "Touching the Future,"  the touch screen came from a person who worked for the Federal government and taught at state university:

Elo TouchSystems’ first touch screen grew out of the work of Sam Hurst, a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who was on teaching leave at Kentucky University.
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What he came up with, in 1971, was a device consisting of two pieces of electrically conductive paper, separated by an insulating layer.