The very first computer mouse was a blocky wooden box made from a piece of a Douglas fir tree.

Douglas Engelbart and his lead engineer Bill English built the first mouse at the Stanford Research Institute in California. They used a wooden case because it was easy to carve while they were testing their new ideas. Inside the block, two metal wheels were placed at right angles to each other. One wheel tracked movement up and down, while the other tracked left and right.On December 9, 1968, Engelbart showed the mouse to the world during a famous presentation in San Francisco. This event is now known as The Mother of All Demos because he also showed off early versions of video calls and clickable links. At the time, computers were huge machines that people controlled by typing complex codes. The mouse was a breakthrough because it let anyone point and click on a screen.The Stanford Research Institute later sold the rights to the technology to Apple for about $40,000. Even though the mouse is used by billions of people today, Engelbart never made any money from royalties because his patent expired in 1987. By the time home computers became popular in the 1990s, the wooden shell had been replaced by plastic. You can still see the original wooden prototype today at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.