Angelina Jolie wears a Tissot T-Touch

I keep a list of things that arrived earlier than anyone remembers, and the touch screen sits near the top. We date it to 2007, to a man in a black turtleneck dragging his thumb across a slab of glass. So when did the first watch you could run by touching the crystal actually show up? Not 2007. Try 1999 - and by 2005 one of them is riding on Angelina Jolie's wrist in a movie about two married assassins who never told each other what they did for a living.

The film is Doug Liman's Mr. & Mrs. Smith, written by Simon Kinberg, and it opens in a marriage counselor's office. John and Jane Smith get asked, gently, how they met (Bogotá, both of them on the run from the local authorities, neither one saying why) and how long they've been married - five years, says John; six, says Jane. Jane, played by Jolie, kills people for money behind the cover of a staffing firm, a quiet office of women at computer terminals.

Catch her wrist in close-up and the watch is lit, its compass ring swung to the cardinal points: a Tissot T-Touch. Tissot put it out in 1999 and called it the first tactile watch ever made, which for once isn't just ad copy. The sapphire crystal has seven electrodes printed on the underside, so a tap at the edge of the glass flips the hands and the small LCD between compass, altimeter, barometer, chronograph, thermometer and alarm. The first movement was the ETA E40.301, and most of the case went to sensors instead of gears. Swatch's Asulab lab had been filing the patents since 1995. A touch-glass interface, eight years before the phone we all give the credit to.

Here's the part I like. The watch did not wander onto the set - Tissot paid for the spot, then ran ads boasting that Jane needs her T-Touch to "get critical information for the successful fulfillment of her assignment." It was the second time they'd strapped one to Jolie; she wore a T-Touch as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life two years earlier. And a watch built around a compass, a barometer and an altimeter is field gear, the kind of thing you carry up a mountain or across a border. It is not what you wear to run a temp agency. The wardrobe knew exactly who Jane was.