In 1964, an American inventor named Douglas Engelbart wanted a better way to point at things on a computer screen. He carved a small block of wood, drilled in two metal wheels at right angles to each other, added a single red button on top and ran a wire out the back. He called it a “mouse” because the cable looked like a long tail.
Engelbart demoed his idea in 1968 in what people now call “The Mother of All Demos.” He showed mice, links you could click, video calling and shared documents - decades before any of that was normal. The audience was stunned.
Sadly for Engelbart, his patent ran out in 1987, just before Macs and PCs made the mouse standard equipment. He reportedly earned only about $10,000 in total from his invention. He kept inventing anyway, and today nearly every screen-based device on Earth uses some version of his point-and-click idea.
