The First Computer Mouse Was Made of Wood

In 1964, a simple wooden box with two metal wheels changed computing forever. Douglas Engelbart, working at the Stanford Research Institute, wasn't trying to make tech history—he was solving a practical problem: how do you interact with a computer screen without typing commands?

The first mouse was carved from a block of pine (some sources say redwood) by the SRI machine shop. It wasn't sleek or sophisticated. Inside the wooden shell sat a circuit board and two perpendicular metal wheels that rolled as you moved the device, tracking X and Y coordinates. A single button on top let you make selections. A wire snaked out the back, connecting to the computer.

Why "Mouse"?

That wire is actually how it got its name. With the cord trailing behind like a tail, the device resembled a small rodent scurrying across a desk. The nickname stuck immediately—so much so that Engelbart's team never bothered coming up with anything more official.

The concept actually started in November 1963, when Engelbart sketched ideas in his notebook during a graphics conference in Reno, Nevada. He was pondering how to adapt the planimeter (a device for measuring area on maps) into something that could input coordinates. His chief engineer, Bill English, turned those sketches into reality the following year.

The Demo That Changed Everything

For four years, the wooden mouse remained a lab curiosity. Then came December 9, 1968. Engelbart stood before a crowd at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco and delivered what's now called "The Mother of All Demos." For 90 minutes, he demonstrated the mouse alongside other revolutionary concepts: videoconferencing, hypertext, and collaborative editing. The audience watched in stunned silence as a wooden box controlled on-screen actions in real-time.

The demonstration showcased technologies that wouldn't become mainstream for decades. But the mouse? That was immediately recognizable as the future of human-computer interaction.

From Wood to Everywhere

Engelbart filed for a patent in 1967 and received U.S. Patent 3,541,541 in 1970 for his "X-Y position indicator for a display system." By then, the design had evolved beyond wood, but the core concept remained identical. Two wheels became a rolling ball, which eventually became optical sensors, then lasers.

Today's wireless mice bear little physical resemblance to that chunky wooden prototype, but they operate on the same fundamental principle Engelbart established: moving your hand in physical space should move a cursor in digital space. It's so intuitive now that we forget someone had to invent it.

The original wooden mouse resides in the Computer History Museum, a reminder that revolutionary technology doesn't always arrive in a polished package. Sometimes it shows up as a block of pine with a wire tail, dreamed up by an engineer who saw beyond the command line.