Computer mice
Last updated: April 23, 2010.
Once upon a time, if you'd seen a mouse in
your room you might have screamed and jumped up on the desk. Today, the mouse has jumped
on your desk instead: it's the handy little pointer that makes your
computer easy to use. The first mouse was made of wood and designed
over four decades ago in 1961. Today, mice sell by the million and
hardly a computer ships without one. They've changed quite a
bit in that time but they still work in much the same way. Let's take
a look inside!
Photo: The computer mouse is an amazingly ergonomic
little gadget that bridges the gulf between person and machine. Choose your mouse
carefully and don't be afraid to spend money on it: you'll probably be holding
this thing for several hours a day for quite a few years, so it's worth the investment!
What is a computer mouse?
A mouse is something you push along your desktop to make a cursor
(pointing device) move on your screen. So what a mouse has to do is
figure out how much you're moving your hand and in which direction.
There are two main kinds of mice and they do this job in two
different ways, either with a moving rubber ball or with LED optics.
How a ball computer mouse works
How does a mouse like this actually work? As you move it across your desk, the ball
rolls under its own weight and pushes against two plastic rollers linked to
thin wheels (numbered 6 and 7 in the photo). One of the wheels detects movements in an up-and-down direction (like the
y-axis on graph/chart paper); the other detects side-to-side movements (like the x-axis on graph paper).
How do the wheels measure your hand movements? As you move the mouse,
the ball moves the rollers that turn one or both of the wheels. If you move the mouse straight
up, only the y-axis wheel turns; if you move to the right, only the
x-axis wheel turns. And if you move the mouse at an angle, the ball
turns both wheels at once. Now here's the clever bit. Each wheel is made
up of plastic spokes and, as it turns, the spokes repeatedly break a light beam.
The more the wheel turns, the more times the beam is broken. So counting
the number of times the beam is broken is a way of precisely measuring how far the wheel has turned and
how far you've pushed the mouse.
The counting and measuring is done by the microchip inside the mouse, which
sends details down the cable to your computer. Software in your computer moves the cursor on
your screen by a corresponding amount.
Photo:A ball mouse detects movements by using a wheel with spokes
to break a light beam. On one side of the wheel, there's an
LED (light emitter) that generates an infrared beam. On the other side, there's a photoelectric cell (light detector) that
receives the beam. As the heavy rubber ball moves, it makes the wheel turn, so its spokes break the beam. Counting the number of times the beam is broken measures how much the mouse has moved. See a bigger version of this photo on our
Flickr page.
There are various problems with mice like this. They don't work on all surfaces. Ideally, you need a special
mouse mat but, even if you have one, the rubber ball and its rollers gradually pick
up dirt, so the x- and y-axis wheels turn erratically and make the
pointer stutter across your screen. One solution is to keep taking your mouse to pieces and cleaning it;
another option is to get yourself an optical mouse.
How an optical mouse works
An optical mouse works in a completely different way. It shines a
bright light down onto your desk from an LED
(light-emitting diode) mounted on the bottom of the mouse. The light bounces straight back up off the desk into a
photocell (photoelectric cell),
also mounted under the mouse, a short distance from the LED. The photocell has a lens in front of it that magnifies the reflected light, so the mouse can
respond more precisely to your hand movements. As you push the mouse around your desk, the pattern of reflected light changes—and the chip inside the mouse uses this to figure out how you're moving your hand.
Photo: An optical mouse seen from underneath.
Note how the rubber ball you'd find in a ball-wheel mouse has been replaced by the photocell and LED.
Some optical mice have two LEDs. The first one shines light down onto the desk. The light from that is picked up by the photocell. The second LED lights up a red plastic strip along the back of the mouse so you can see it's
working. Most optical mice also have a wheel at the
front so you can scroll pages on-screen much faster. You can click the wheel too,
so it functions like the third (center) button on a conventional ball mouse.
A short history of the computer mouse
For most of their history,
computers were the province of
egg-heads and boffins. You needed a maths degree just to understand
the manual and you could only tell them what to do by feeding in a
stack of index cards punched with holes. All that started to change
when a brilliant US computer scientist named
Douglas Engelbart (1925–) invented the computer mouse.
Engelbart realized computers were far too useful just for boffins: he could see they
had the power to change people's lives. But he could also see that
they needed to be much easier to use. So, during the 1960s, he
pioneered most of the easy-to-use computer technologies that we now
take for granted, including on-screen word processing, hypertext (the
way of linking documents together used in web pages like these),
windows (so you can have more than one document or program in view at
a time), and video conferencing.
But he's still best known for inventing the mouse, or the "X-Y
Position Indicator" as it was originally known. That stuffy
name was dropped when someone spotted that the cable hanging out
looked just like a mouse's tail. From then on, Engelbart's invention
was known simply as the "mouse".
For more about the history of computer mice, take a look at
