Did You Know That The First Computer Mouse Was Made Of Wooden? - By 3Jackass

The Computer Mouse undeniably the cutest of the gadget world. The small, clickable tool is the reason we can browse social networks, search Google, play games and send email. But did you know that the first mouse was made of wood?

The mouse's key feature is its trackball. The first known trackball can be traced to the Canadian Navy in 1952. This "mouse" was actually a bowling ball attached to a complicated hardware system that could sense the motion of the ball and imitate the movement on a screen. But the world would never have access to the heavy-duty mouse — since it was a secret military creation the tech was never patented or produced.

Eleven years after the military design, Douglas Engelbart became the father of the modern mouse.

The basic idea of the mouse came to Douglas Engelbart (American Engineer) for the first time in 1961 while sitting at a conference in computer graphics, his mind reflecting on the challenge of making interactive computing more efficient, it occurred to him that, using a pair of small wheels which crossed a table, a wheel spinning horizontally, one vertically, with this the computer could track their combined rotations and move the cursor on the screen accordingly. The wheels could work something like wheels on a planimeter (a tool used by engineers and geographers to measure areas on a map, plan, drawing, etc.) but in this case, rolling the wheels around the table would draw the coordinates x, y for a cursor on a computer screen. He wrote down the idea in his notebook for future reference.

A year later, Engelbart received a long-awaited grant from SRI to launch his dream research titled “Raising the Human Intellect,” for which he envisioned intellectual workers sitting on high-performance interactive workstations, accessing a space with a wealth of online information, where you could collaborate on important issues. He hired a small research team and established a basic lab with computers and teletypes.

Engelbart and his research team rounded out the best pointing devices to compare and equipped some internal prototypes to add to the mix, such as a pedal and a knee device. Engelbart also reviewed his earlier notes with his senior engineer Bill English, who built a prototype of the handheld device with perpendicular wheels mounted on a block of carved wood, with a button at the top, to test with others, this was the first mouse.