Before sleek ergonomic designs and RGB lighting, the computer mouse was a humble chunk of wood with wheels. In 1964, engineer Douglas Engelbart and his team at Stanford Research Institute unveiled the world’s first mouse, a clunky rectangular box carved from oak. It looked more like a child’s toy than a tech breakthrough, but this little wooden gadget laid the groundwork for how billions interact with computers today.
Engelbart’s invention was part of his ambitious project to augment human intellect. The mouse, nicknamed the “X-Y Position Indicator,” featured two metal wheels that tracked horizontal and vertical movement. A single red button on top sent signals to a computer, allowing users to click icons on a screen—a radical idea when most computers relied on punch cards. The wooden shell? Pure practicality. Engelbart’s team used whatever materials were on hand, and oak provided durability without breaking their modest budget.
The first public demo in 1968, later dubbed “the Mother of All Demos,” stunned audiences. Engelbart used his wooden mouse to showcase hyperlinks, video conferencing, and collaborative editing—concepts decades ahead of their time. Journalists focused on the strange device in his hand, dubbing it a “mouse” for its tail-like cable. The name stuck, though Engelbart reportedly preferred “bug.”
Despite its revolutionary role, the wooden mouse had quirks. The wheels collected dust, requiring frequent cleaning. Users couldn’t glide it smoothly—they had to lift and reset it like a vintage Etch A Sketch. And forget left-handed users; the design assumed everyone was right-handed, a bias that lingered in tech for years.
Engelbart never became rich from his invention. The patent, filed in 1967 and granted in 1970, belonged to SRI, which licensed it to Apple for around $40,000. By the time mice went mainstream in the 1980s, plastic had replaced wood, trackballs supplanted wheels, and extra buttons multiplied like rabbits. Yet Engelbart’s original vision—of intuitive, screen-based computing—endured.
Today, the wooden mouse sits in museums as a relic of analog ingenuity. It’s a reminder that even the most transformative technologies start as rough drafts. So next time you scroll with your laser-powered mouse, spare a thought for its blocky ancestor. It may not have had Bluetooth or customizable DPI, but it proved a simple truth: sometimes, the best ideas come in unassuming packages. Even ones that look like they belong in a lumberyard.
