The invention that BEHIND Apple to a world-beating, billion-selling, society-changing colossus not a laptop or music player; it is iPhone. It seemed to appear in 2007, fully formed, beautifully conceived, self-confident, and conceptually clear.

But behind the scenes, the iPhone we know today was made possible by more than just bold bets, fanatical attention to detail, brilliant design, and a vision for the future; there are also false starts, last-minute redesigns, and a few strokes of luck.

For starters, the product Apple is set to build first isn’t a phone. It was a tablet.

Interdisciplinary teams of Apple is always experimenting with new technologies. “There are hundreds of little startups just scraping by, making things,” says Sensors VP Myra Haggerty. “Sometimes someone says, ‘Hey, look what we’re working on!’ Then you go to a random lab somewhere, and they do this cool thing. ‘What can we do about it?’”

Take, for example, Duncan Kerr’s projector demo.

In 1999, Kerr, a British designer with a background in polymath design—engineering, technology, industrial design, interface prototyping—joined the chief of industrial design. Jony Ivein the studio.

In early 2003, he began holding Tuesday meetings with interface designers and input engineers to explore new ways of interacting with computers; after all, the old “point the mouse, click the button” routine is 25 years old. Kerr’s team experimented with technologies such as camera-driven systems, spatial audio, haptics (vibrating feedback), and 3D screens. “We invite research people, or companies with innovative technologies. We do a lot of demos, test things,” he said.

Kerr was particularly intrigued by the idea of ​​manipulating on-screen objects with fingers. But teasing out ideas on paper can only take a team so far. He, along with interface designers Bas Ording and Imran Chaudhri, wanted to create a real-world multi-touch display to continue their explorations. Enter: the iGesture NumPad mouse/touchpad.

It’s a flat, black trackpad, 6.25 x 5 inches, made by a Delaware company called FingerWorks. Wayne Westerman is a piano player and a recurring stress sufferer; together with his professor John Elias, he invented a set of keyboards that required almost a touch of a feather. Since they can detect and track multiple finger touches simultaneously, they can also translate movements that you drew above, replaces the actions of the mouse. For “Open,” for example, you can curl your fingers upwards as if opening a jar.

In late 2003, Apple commissioned FingerWorks to produce a larger version of their multi-touch pad: 12 x 9.5 inches, a better approximation of the size of a computer screen. Kerr’s team set up a test rig in the design studio of Infinite Loop 2. They mounted an LCD projector on a tripod, which shone directly onto the trackpad. They glued a sheet of white paper over it so that the image on the projector—produced by a nearby Power Mac—would be bright and clear. Then the fun begins: developing ways to interact with on-screen elements. You can slide one finger to move an icon on the projected image. You can spread two fingers to enlarge the map or photo. Using both hands, you can tap, move, and stretch objects. It was magic.

In November 2003, Kerr’s team showed the demo to Ive, who showed it to Steve Jobs. Everything who saw the multi-touch demo loved it, swore it was the future. What, they weren’t sure yet.

In late 2005, Jobs attended the 50th birthday party of a Microsoft engineer, the husband of his wife’s friend, Laurene. At dinner, the man lectured Jobs on how Microsoft solved the future of computing by inventing the tablet with a stylus: portable, powerful, untethered.

“But he did the wrong thing with the device,” Jobs later said, according to Walter Isaacson’s book Steve Jobs. “This dinner was like the 10th time he talked to me about it, and I was so hurt that I went home and said, ‘Fuck this. Let’s show him what a tablet really is.'”