I love to play the piano, and maybe that has something to do with why I like the iPhone. This never occurred to me until I read an interesting post about Wayne Westerman by Arnold Kim of MacRumors.com. Westerman co-founded a company called FingerWorks in 1998 that developed a number of multi-touch input devices. Apple acquired FingerWorks and all of its intellectual property in 2005, Westerman now works at Apple as a Senior Engineer, and Westerman played an important role in the creation of the iPhone (and the acquisition of his company appears to be a basis for Apple's claim that it owns the patents on multi-touch).
FingerWorks sold a product called the TouchStream. It was a touch-sensitive, flat membrane keyboard on which you could both type and use gestures with your fingers to do things like move and click the mouse pointer, copy and paste, open and save, etc. Here is a review of the keyboard from back in 2003 that contains lots of information on how it worked, and here is a New York Times article from 2002. You can also read more information on Westerman and his multi-touch inventions from the University of Delaware website, where Westerman got his Ph.D. and did post-doctoral work.
Kim's MacRumors article links to this news story from a few months ago in UDaily, a publication of the University of Delaware's communications and marketing department. In the article, Westerman describes how he came up with the idea for multi-touch in TouchStream keyboard, inspired in part by the piano:
Westerman talked about the role serendipity played in the invention, from his stubborn bout with tendonitis, which hobbled his progress until he devised the touch-sensitive technology, to his experience as a pianist, in which his interaction with the keyboard was graceful and natural.
“I had an ergonomic problem and I paired it with a motivation,” Westerman said of the early inspiration. “I'd always felt that playing the piano was so much more graceful and expressive than using a computer keyboard, and I thought how great it would be if I pulled some of that expression from the piano to the computer experience.”
The iPhone wouldn't be the iPhone without multi-touch, and multi-touch might not be multi-touch without the piano. So a big thanks goes to piano player Wayne Westerman for his role in the development of the iPhone. Based on the picture on his Facebook page, he looks like a pretty fun guy:
