Appalachian Figures
Every time someone taps a phone screen in Bell County, punches an order into a fast food kiosk in Harlan, or checks out at a self service register in Lexington, a quiet piece of Appalachian history flickers to life. The resistive touch technology that made early touch screens practical around the world grew from the mind of a farm boy from Ponza in Bell County, Kentucky, named George Samuel Hurst.
Born in 1927 and raised on a small hill farm near Pineville, Hurst spent his childhood milking cows, hoeing corn, and reading about another rural tinkerer he admired deeply, Thomas Edison. His life would carry him from a Bell County one room school to the Nevada Test Site, from Los Alamos to the basements of Oak Ridge, and into the circuitry of almost every cash register and ATM on earth. This is the Appalachian story behind the touch screen.
From Ponza To Berea
Kentucky vital record indexes list a birth on 13 October 1927 in Bell County for a boy named George S. Hurst, son of James H. Hurst and Myrtle Wright. The family lived in the tiny community of Ponza, tucked between the Cumberland River and the mountains near Pineville. Hurst grew up with two brothers and two sisters on a modest farm where money was scarce and work never ended.
Later reminiscences in Berea College’s alumni magazine describe a boy who loved to take things apart, who would happily wade a cold river to borrow a book rather than walk the long way to the bridge. He devoured stories about Thomas Edison and dreamed, improbably, of being an inventor himself.
Bell County’s schools gave him a path out. Hurst attended Bell County High School in Pineville, then at age fifteen left the mountains for Berea College on a work study scholarship. Berea was founded to educate Appalachian youth of limited means, and Hurst fit the mission perfectly. He washed dishes, cleaned, and worked his way through a physics degree, graduating in 1947 with a major in physics and a minor in mathematics.
At Berea he met another Bell Countian, Betty Lou Partin of Wasioto. She had also come through the college’s labor program. Their courtship would become a sixty two year marriage that carried Bell County values into laboratories and boardrooms around the world.
Health Physics In The Atomic Age
After Berea, Hurst moved briefly to Lexington, earning a master’s degree in physics from the University of Kentucky in 1948. During registration at UK he met another young physicist, Rufus Ritchie, who would become a lifelong friend and collaborator.
That same year, Karl Z. Morgan recruited Hurst to Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. Oak Ridge, born out of the Manhattan Project, was quickly becoming the world center for health physics, the study of radiation hazards and protection.
Hurst spent more than a decade in ORNL’s Health Physics Division. He helped design and field test radiation detectors, neutron dosimeters, and sampling systems, often in places that were themselves historic. A 1953 Atomic Energy Commission report on Operation Upshot Knothole lists him as a coauthor on Project 24.2, which measured gamma and neutron radiation inside fallout shelters and test structures at the Nevada Proving Grounds.
When the United States conducted a later series of nuclear tests under Operation Plumbbob, Hurst and Ritchie returned to Nevada to gather radiation dosimetry data on human exposures, work preserved in an Oak Ridge report titled “Radiation Dosimetry for Human Exposures, Project 39.5.”
His work was not limited to American test sites. In the late 1950s an accident at the Vinca research reactor in Yugoslavia exposed several workers to massive radiation doses. An International Atomic Energy Agency bulletin describes how an American team led by Hurst and Ritchie flew to Vinca with specialized instruments and human shaped “phantoms” to estimate internal doses and plan treatment for the injured men.
The Bell County farm boy had become one of the world’s leading experts on how radiation moved through bodies, buildings, and air, and how to measure it when lives were at stake.
Counting Atoms
While he continued health physics work, Hurst’s curiosity kept pushing toward more fundamental questions. How do individual electrons drift through gases. How might one count individual atoms of a rare isotope.
In the early 1960s Hurst and colleagues at ORNL published a series of papers on time of flight electron transport in gases, using carefully pulsed electron “swarms” to measure drift velocities and diffusion coefficients. That work laid groundwork for later detectors and plasma physics models.
By the 1970s he was at the forefront of something even stranger: resonance ionization spectroscopy. The basic idea was elegant. If one tuned lasers to excite an atom through a specific sequence of energy levels, the atom could be ionized and detected with extraordinary selectivity. Do it right and you could effectively count individual atoms of a given element or isotope.
In 1979 Hurst and coauthors published a massive review article, “Resonance ionization spectroscopy and one atom detection,” in Reviews of Modern Physics. It summarized a decade of work at Oak Ridge and elsewhere and cemented his reputation in what some dubbed one atom physics. A companion piece for a broader audience, “Counting the atoms,” appeared in Physics Today in 1980 and explained how these techniques could detect nearly every element in the periodic table down to single atom sensitivity.
Hurst would go on to coauthor patents on resonance ionization based detectors and found companies such as Atom Sciences to commercialize them, including systems for monitoring noble gas isotopes and radon.
A Basement Company In Oak Ridge
For Appalachian readers, the most visible part of Hurst’s legacy is not hidden in vacuum chambers or mass spectrometers. It sits beneath our fingertips.
In the mid 1960s Hurst took a leave from ORNL to teach physics at the University of Kentucky. There he faced a tedious problem familiar to anyone who has ever run laboratory experiments. He had a towering stack of strip chart recordings that needed to be digitized by hand. As he later joked, it looked like months of work for graduate students with rulers.
Instead of sacrificing grad students, he looked for a way to let a machine read the plots. Working late in the lab with a Van de Graaff generator and sheets of resistive material, Hurst developed an “electric graphical” sensor that could detect the position of a probe on a surface by measuring changes in resistance. The University of Kentucky Research Foundation filed a patent in 1970 titled “Electrical Sensor of Plane Coordinates,” issued in 1972 as United States Patent 3,662,105, naming Hurst and James Parks as inventors.
The device, soon nicknamed the Elograph, was not a screen in the modern sense. It was an opaque tablet, but it could translate drawings and marks into digital coordinates. Industrial Research magazine later selected it as one of the 100 most significant new technical products of 1973.
Hurst and a group of colleagues formed a small company, Elographics, in 1971 to manufacture and improve these sensors. Corporate histories and later interviews recall that they built early products in three different basements around Oak Ridge, assembling sensors in one, electronics in another, and housing in a third.
A Berea College profile captures the excitement of that moment. Hurst recalled that if one could put a touch sensor directly on a computer screen, ordinary people would not need to learn arcane commands. “You could just look at a screen, poke your finger, and get an answer,” he told the interviewer. “Anybody can poke a finger.”
From Elograph To Touch Screen
Turning that vision into hardware required another key step. The Elograph tablets were opaque. To make a true touch screen, the sensor layers had to be transparent.
Throughout the 1970s Elographics refined the technology. One important milestone was a patent titled “Discriminating contact sensor,” filed in 1974 and issued in 1975 as U.S. Patent 3,911,215. It described a flexible resistive sheet separated from another conductive layer by tiny insulating dots. Pressing with a finger brought the sheets together at a point whose coordinates could be read electronically. The patent was assigned to Elographics of Oak Ridge.
Histories of touch technology agree that this resistive design, often developed in partnership with Siemens, became the basis for the first practical transparent resistive touchscreens in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Elographics’ products appeared in specialized terminals and were showcased at events like the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville.
Later patents would push the technology further. Patent databases list Hurst as co inventor on designs for touch screens with non uniform resistive bands, topological mapping grids, and multi touch sensing, many filed with longtime collaborators such as Rufus Ritchie, Donald Bouldin, and Robert Warmack.
Over time Elographics took the brand name Elo Touch Systems, and eventually Elo Touch Solutions. Company retrospectives and regional economic development stories still point back to Hurst’s basement experiments as the seed of a global business whose touchscreens now appear in medical monitors, point of sale terminals, and industrial controls worldwide.
So the next time someone taps “credit” at a gas pump in rural Kentucky, they are using a direct descendant of a Bell County inventor’s frustration with strip charts.
Appalachia In His Bones
Although his work took him far from home, Hurst did not forget where he was from. Kentucky and Appalachian institutions honored him repeatedly. The Kentucky General Assembly’s “Touch Screen Technology” history brief emphasizes that he was born in Ponza, Bell County, and notes that his education at Berea, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Tennessee formed a continuous Appalachian corridor.
The University of Kentucky’s alumni association inducted him into its Hall of Distinguished Alumni. Berea awarded him an honorary doctorate and regularly featured him in alumni publications as a model of what a mountain student could achieve.
Within the scientific community, Hurst became a corporate fellow at ORNL and a fellow of the American Physical Society, receiving multiple IR 100 (later R&D 100) awards for innovations including single atom detectors. He helped found Scientists and Engineers for Appalachia, an organization that tried to connect high tech research with the needs of the mountain region.
He and Betty also invested in education. At the University of Tennessee they endowed the G. Samuel and Betty P. Hurst Scholarship Fund for physics majors and supported a graduate fellowship in his name.
Local writers in Bell County still claim him as one of their own. A Kentucky Farm Bureau profile on the county notes that the inventor of resistive touch screen technology “was born and raised in the small town of Ponza,” and points out that his contributions now appear daily in everything from ATMs to sales kiosks.
A Life Remembered
Hurst died in Oak Ridge on July 4, 2010, one day after celebrating his sixty second wedding anniversary with Betty. His obituary in the Knoxville News Sentinel, drawn from Weatherford Mortuary in Oak Ridge, described him as “much beloved husband, father, grandfather, inventor, author, scientist, and creative thinker.” It noted that he held more than thirty patents, had traveled to Japan to study long term health effects in atomic bomb survivors, and “invented the original computer touch screen.”
A Physics Today remembrance by Robert Compton and James Parks called him a “world acclaimed scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur,” and emphasized three threads that ran through his life: his pioneering role in health physics, his leadership in resonance ionization spectroscopy, and his founding of successful high tech companies.
Betty Lou Partin Hurst, who had met him in Berea’s ice cream shop as a young student from Bell County, died in 2020. Her obituary recalled how she often traveled with Sam on business trips, from Las Vegas during postwar radiation studies to long stays in China, and how she entertained visiting scientists in their Oak Ridge home.
Why Hurst’s Story Matters In Appalachian History
At first glance George Samuel Hurst’s life might seem like a standard tale of scientific success, a story told in patents and journal articles. For Appalachia, it is more than that.
Hurst belonged to the first generation of Appalachian students who rode the long postwar wave of federal investment in science and higher education. His path ran from a subsistence farm in Ponza to Berea’s work college experiment, then through land grant training at the University of Kentucky to a national laboratory built to manage the atom. Each step depended on public institutions that gave bright mountain kids a chance to test their talents.
At the same time, his story complicates stereotypes about the region. Bell County is often remembered for coal, timber, and flood disasters. Yet one of its sons helped craft the touch interfaces that now allow people with limited literacy or computer training to use kiosks, bank machines, and voting machines. Histories of touch technology regularly start with Hurst’s Elograph and resistive sensors before moving on to Apple era multitouch and smartphones.
Finally, his life underlines how Appalachia is intertwined with global science. Hurst measured fallout in Nevada, advised on radiation accidents in Yugoslavia, taught and built companies in Tennessee, and sent his instruments into laboratories across Europe and Asia. Yet when Kentucky’s legislature decided to highlight homegrown innovations, they chose touch screen technology and put a Bell County birthdate in the first paragraph.
For a region often cast as backward or technophobic, the fact that our fingers travel the world each time they tap a screen that traces back to Ponza is worth remembering.
Sources & Further Reading
Kentucky Vital Record Indexes, 1911–1999, entry for George S. Hurst, 13 Oct 1927, Bell County, Kentucky (via FamilySearch; cited in “George Samuel Hurst,” Wikipedia). Wikipedia
L. J. Deal, H. H. Rossi, and G. S. Hurst, “Physical measurements of gamma and neutron radiation in shelter and instrumentation evaluation,” Operation Upshot Knothole, Project 24.2, AEC WT 789, 1953. Wikipedia+1
G. S. Hurst and R. H. Ritchie, “Radiation Dosimetry for Human Exposures,” Operation Plumbbob, Project 39.5, Oak Ridge National Laboratory report WT 1504, 1958. Wikipedia+1
“A unique experiment at Vinca,” IAEA Bulletin, describing the health physics team led by G. S. Hurst and Rufus Ritchie. International Atomic Energy Agency
G. S. Hurst et al., “Resonance ionization spectroscopy and one atom detection,” Reviews of Modern Physics 51 (1979): 767–819. Georgia Southern Scholars+1
G. S. Hurst et al., “Counting the atoms,” Physics Today 33, no. 9 (September 1980): 24–29. PHYSICS TODAY+1
U.S. Patent 3,662,105, “Electrical Sensor of Plane Coordinates,” filed 1970, issued 1972, assigned to University of Kentucky Research Foundation. The Inventors
U.S. Patent 3,911,215, “Discriminating Contact Sensor,” filed 1974, issued 1975, assigned to Elographics, Inc. Google Patents+1
Robert N. Compton and James E. Parks, “George Samuel Hurst,” Physics Today obituary, February 2011. PHYSICS TODAY+1
John A. Auxier, “In Memoriam: George Samuel Hurst, 1927–2010,” Health Physics Society (referenced in later biographies). Wikipedia
Legacy.com and Knoxville News Sentinel obituary, “George Samuel Hurst,” July 2010. Legacy
Weatherford Mortuary and Legacy.com obituaries for Betty Lou Partin Hurst, 2020. Weatherford Mortuary+1
Normandi Ellis, “Sam Hurst Touches on a Few Great Ideas,” Berea College Magazine 77, no. 4 (Spring 2007). Berea College Magazine+1
“Touch Screen Technology,” Kentucky Legislative Research Commission, Kentucky History Moment series (2021). Legislative Research Commission
“The story of Dr. George Sam Hurst,” Middlesboro News, 6 August 2018. Middlesboro News
“George Samuel Hurst,” encyclopedia style biographies on English and NASA related wikis. Wikipedia+2NASA Fandom+2
“The 120: Bell County,” Kentucky Farm Bureau feature highlighting Hurst as inventor of resistive touch screen technology. Kentucky Farm Bureau
“History of the Touch Screen Computer Interface,” TheInventors.org and related popular histories of touch technology. The Inventors+1
Elo Touch Solutions support page, “Where can I find information about the history of Elo Touch Solutions.” Elo Support
Hidden Heroes essay, “Sam Hurst, Jeff Han, Ken Kocienda and multitouch interface.” Hidden Heroes
Touchscreen histories and timelines summarizing Elographics’ resistive touch developments and later multi touch patents. Wikipedia+2compsci04.snc.edu+2