Why a sausage can do what your gloves cannot - Charles Wallace and Sajan Saini

Dig into the science of touchscreens, and find out the difference between the two most common types: capacitive and resistive.

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In 2010, South Korea experienced a particularly cold winter. People couldn’t activate their smartphones while wearing gloves, so they began wielding snack sausages— causing one company to see a 40% rise in sausage sales. So, what could sausages do that gloves couldn’t? In other words, how do touchscreens actually work? Charles Wallace and Sajan Saini dig into the science of touchscreens.

Lesson by Charles Wallace and Sajan Saini, directed by Luis Torres, Mr. Flama.

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Thank you so much to our patrons for your support! Without you this video would not be possible! Ovidiu Mrd, paul g mohney, Steven Razey, Nathan Giusti, Helen Lee, Anthony Benedict, Karthik Balsubramanian, Annastasshia Ames, Amy Lopez, Vinh-Thuy Nguyen, Liz Candee, Ugur Doga Sezgin, Karmi Nguyen, John C. Vesey, Yelena Baykova, Nick Johnson, Carlos H. Costa, Jennifer Kurkoski, Ryan B Harvey, Akinola Emmanuel, Jose Arcadio Valdes Franco, Sebastiaan Vleugels, Karl Laius, JY Kang, Abhishek Goel, Heidi Stolt, Nicole Sund, Karlee Finch, Mario Mejia, Denise A Pitts, Doug Henry, Keven Webb, Mihai Sandu, Deepak Iyer, Javid Gozalov, Kyanta Yap, Rebecca Reineke, William Biersdorf, Patricia Alves Panagides, Yvette Mocete, Cyrus Garay, Samuel Barbas, LadyGeek, Marin Kovachev, Penelope Misquitta, Hans Peng, Gaurav Mathur, Erik Biemans, Tony, Michelle, Katie and Josh Pedretti and Hoai Nam Tran.

[careless_siren]

The fact that our body's chemistry plays a big role in touchscreen technology is mind-blowing to me.

[joyeeta]

The animators of TedEd are rally amazing at their job.

[spmagic]

There are so many impressive technologies we use everyday but don’t know much about.

[Sid-mjqf]

Ted-Ed always answers random questions which sometimes pops up in mind and vanishes in thin air... The usage different types of animation in every videos and unique examples is mind blowing every time...Thank you Ted-Ed, You don't know how much you helped me in understanding this world🙏

[arvlis]

Wow, I didn't know there were two kinds of touchscreens! Whenever a self-checkout machine, a ticket machine or something wasn't responding I always assumed it was a computing latency issue of devices being old. But it makes sense now that with devices based on the resistive version, I wasn't just imagining that it worked better if I pressed a little harder, it needs to be pressed! Thank you so much for this explaination!

[pinkywinky]

I live in Japan and for 12 years I worked as a quality inspector for Nitto. A manufacturing company that literally makes touch screens for Apple, Samsung, Nintendo and other devices. It’s really fascinating tech and the research that goes into improving it seem to never end.

[myusanawnghkd]

You can say that this video was quite touching

[AkshayKumarX]

All this beautiful work for a 5 minute educational video, a priceless gift.

[lthereader]

what amazes me is the terrifying speed this process is done. your phone has to do the math on the voltages of every single node every moment, and then react to it in milliseconds when there is an anomaly. in a time period we humans would call "instantly"

[surgicalblazer]

Words are not enough to describe how much I love this channel. Thanks so much for all this great content 🙂

[rollintweeds]

Super-informative and entertaining. From the unexpected South Korean sausage anecdote to engaging imagery of subatomic particles relating to one another, I was learning and loving it. Thank you, TedED!

[shreeyamittal]

I've really wondered that too, especially since I tried to make a stylus at home and found it wouldn't function without a conducting material. Brilliant video, and thank you so much for such interesting content!

[soosandras]

The first phone with capacitive touch screen was an LG, not the iphone.

[Beeeeeeeeee.Z]

TED-Ed is easily one of the best YouTube Channels. Both in terms of creativity and content. As a curious person and creative myself, I am glad that a channel like this exists!

[ryemamaril]

Let's appreciate how beautiful the animation is 🥰

[kchishol]

There are also special gloves with special material on the fingertips to allow using touchscreens. Perhaps a sequel video explaining that function is called for.

[XD]

So basically I've been shocking myself for this whole time 😂😂

[nrsrymj]

Wow can't get closer to "how what you're doing right now works"

[HeadCannon]

It's crazy how touchscreens are such an integral part of our life and yet I never actually knew how they worked. Idk if its just me but the fact that they use our body's conductivity is surprising but also makes perfect sense

[knightlon]

iPhone wasn't the first capacitive touchscreeen phone. It was the LG Prada. Apple was the one to go more popular, though.