Take a look at the mouse under your hand. Plastic, maybe wireless, maybe lit up. The first computer mouse was none of those. It was a wooden box with two perpendicular metal wheels underneath and a single cable dangling from the back.
This wooden box was the ancestor of a tool we all use every day. But the most surprising part of the story is that its inventor earned almost no money from the invention.
A note in 1963, a box in 1964
The owner of the idea was Douglas Engelbart. At the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in California, Engelbart was researching how people could work more efficiently with computers. According to Wikipedia, he first wrote the idea in his notebook on November 14, 1963.
The person who made the idea tangible was Bill English. English joined Engelbart's lab in 1964 and built the first prototype from his sketches. The photo record at History of Information also dates this first mouse to "about 1964".
According to the Centre for Computing History, the prototype's body was wood, and underneath it had two thin metal wheels in contact with the surface. One wheel measured horizontal movement, the other vertical. Each wheel was connected to a potentiometer, so as the wheel turned the cursor moved along that axis.
Why "mouse"?
Nobody remembers exactly. In Engelbart's own words: "No one can remember. It just looked like a mouse with a tail, and we all called it that."
That "tail" was the cable coming out of the back of the device. With the wooden box and the cable stretching from it side by side, the result really did look like a small rodent.
The day the world saw it: December 9, 1968
The mouse was introduced to the world on December 9, 1968. In a presentation in San Francisco that day, later known as the "Mother of All Demos", Engelbart showed the mouse live, along with ideas like text editing and linked documents.
A small note is needed here: the idea of the mouse wasn't born in a single place. According to Wikipedia, in Germany Telefunken offered an input device called the "Rollkugel", which it had developed independently in 1966, as an optional accessory for its SIG 100 terminal in a brochure dated October 2, 1968. That device worked with a ball mechanism.
The mouse was in fact part of a much bigger project of Engelbart's. NLS (oN-Line System), developed at the Augmentation Research Center he founded, showed the mouse, bitmapped displays, word processing and hypertext together. Engelbart had sketched the framework of this vision in the report "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework", which he wrote in October 1962.
| The 1964 prototype | Today's mouse |
|---|---|
| Wooden body | Plastic or metal case |
| Two perpendicular metal wheels | Optical or laser sensor |
| A cable out the back, the "tail" | Often wireless |
| In a single lab | On nearly every desk |
$40,000 and zero royalties
The patent was held not by Engelbart but by the institution he worked for, SRI. According to the Centre for Computing History, Engelbart says he learned years later that SRI had licensed the mouse to Apple for "something like $40,000". Wikipedia, for its part, writes that the patent expired before the mouse became widespread on personal computers.
The result: the man who invented the mouse never received any royalties from the invention. Both Wikipedia and the Centre for Computing History confirm this. But recognition came, though late: in 1997 he received both the ACM Turing Award and the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, and in December 2000 he was honored with the US National Medal of Technology. Engelbart died on July 2, 2013, at the age of 88.
Even the name of the unit Engelbart worked in described its goal: the Augmentation Research Center, a research center for "augmenting" human abilities. The wooden box was only one piece of this big idea. Every time you click the mouse on your desk today, you are using a small piece of a vision sketched in a research lab in the 1960s.
Which tool we use today, do you think, was invented by someone whose name we've never heard?