Briton: 'I invented the computer mouse 20 years before the Americans

Professor Ralph Benjamin, 91, at home in Bristol

Professor Ralph Benjamin, from Bristol, said he developed the device while developing radar tracking systems for warships, but that the idea was kept confidential by the Admiralty.

The invention of the mouse has long been credited to Doug Engelbart, who died last week, aged 88. His obituaries recounted how he had first started working on the gadget in 1961, while at the Stanford Research Institute’s (SRI’s) Augmentation Research Center, in California.

After first trying various options, including a joystick, a knee-operated pointer and a foot-operated control called a “rat”, Engelbart’s team built a device made from a boxy wooden shell on two wheels, which became the modern mouse.

However, Prof Benjamin, 90, said he had come up with the same concept while working for the Royal Navy Scientific Service. He joined in 1944, working initially at Witley in Surrey and later at Portsdown Hill, near Portsmouth.

As the war ended, he was working on a programme called the “Comprehensive Display System” (CDS) to allow ships to monitor low-flying attacking aircraft on a grid using X and Y coordinates. As part of the project, he said he designed a cursor which could be controlled on a display screen using a “mouse-like” instrument.

The device, known by his team as a “ball tracker”, was different to a modern mouse and closer to a trackball in that it was stationary and worked by a hand being moved across it, rather than being manipulated itself.

A prototype was made, using a metallic ball, which rolled on two rubber-coated wheels, controlling the X and Y axis, all housed in a metal casing.

In the end, though, the navy opted to use a joystick, instead of the ball tracker. The tracker was described in various internal Admiralty documents, but was kept secret, and not disclosed, explicitly when the technology was patented, in 
1946.

 Prof Benjamin, 90, said: “The system was an interface between digital data and a display. It therefore needed a cursor that could steer independently to reach a spot and record the position of the data.

“I suggested one way of doing it was with a joystick but the other way of doing it was something you rested your palm on, which we would now call a mouse.”

He added: “The Admiralty at the time were not interested in making profits so they decided to make it confidential by patenting it. Household computers mouse uses something very similar to the version that I thought of to identify data on the screen.”

Despite seeing little credit for developing the device, Prof Benjamin said he was happy to see it being used so widely around the world.

He added: “I am pleased that the basic concept I developed is being used very widely. More widely than I envisaged, because technology at the time was so far removed from the technology we have today. Throughout history, ideas or reinvented or redirected at some point. That is life, and life is a four-letter word after all.”

Prof Benjamin, who is Jewish, was born in Germany in 1922, but was sent to boarding school in Switzerland at the age of 14, to avoid Nazi persecution. He later made his way to Britain. His parents were killed in the Holocaust.

After the war, he remained working as a scientist in the Royal Navy, and went on to have a distinguished career in defence research, developing several new military technologies.

In 1971, he became superintendent director at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), in Cheltenham, and was later tasked with briefing Margaret Thatcher on security issues, when she was prime minister. After GCHQ, he went to work for North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

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