What’s the most famous Swiss contribution to personal computing? If you said, “The World Wide Web”, you’d probably be right – it was invented at Switzerland’s CERN laboratories by Tim Berners Lee. But there’s another Swiss contribution that’s a bit less flashy, but just as essential to how we spend our time on the computer: the humble mouse.
The first mice were, comparatively, something of a rat. Bulky and awkward by today’s standards, the early mouse was a wooden box that didn’t fit comfortably in the palm of your hand. Invented by Doug Engelbart and Bill English at California’s Stanford Research Institute in 1963, the mouse was designed to measure the area of a 2D flat surface. With two wheels embedded at right angles to each other on the underside of the box, the box could be dragged across one dimension of the surface, and then the other, in order to obtain the calculation. With its long electrical plug cord and single red button in the corner of the box, it was early on compared to the animal whose we still use today, a mouse.
Within a few years, everyone was working to build a better mouse, including a certain professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Jean-Daniel Nicoud. In the age of room-sized mainframe computers, Nicoud was obsessed with miniaturization. He had developed an early series of personal computers called SMAKY (which stands for SMart Keyboard) in 1975, and soon after, when Niklaus Wirth, a professor at ETH Zurich, came knocking on his door asking for a computer mouse like he’d seen on his sabbatical in Silicon Valley, Nicoud set about to develop a Swiss prototype.
Working with micromechanics engineer (and trained watchmaker) André Guignard at Depraz SA, their new design incorporated a single hard rubber ball that could rotate in any direction. This ball was connected to two separate gears arranged at 90 degrees, with an optical encoder to detect the forward-backward and left-right motion by shining lights through the slits in the wheels. This mechanism – the first of its kind – allowed for smooth and accurate tracking of movement, and its precision, durability and reliability set a high standard for subsequent mouse designs.
The patented design was developed by the Swiss company Logitech, first as the Logitech Mouse but later as the P4. First sold in 1982, the P4 was Logitech’s first computer mouse and one of the first commercially available mice sold. With its three buttons set in a bright plastic palm-sized dome, it was a significant step away from its boxy American predecessor and a step toward our current ideas of ergonomics.
The P4 was a success, but like other mice made by Logitech’s rivals, it wasn’t perfect. Because they were “dumb”, with no brain of their own, mice had to rely on the computer itself to handle movement detection and data processing, which could often lead to mechanical failures or misinterpretation of signals. Until a Swiss engineer at Logitech, René Sommer, figured out how to make the mouse “smart”. He designed a mouse with a built-in microprocessor capable of computing its data locally, making the mouse more independent, efficient and error-free. In addition, he reorganized the mouse’s interior components to make it smaller and more compact while reducing the cost.
Quickly adopted by Logitech, Sommer’s design made a significant addition to the history of the mouse. His innovative design paved the way for the mass market adoption of the mouse by making it more practical and user-friendly for a broader audience. This contributed significantly to Logitech’s success in popularizing the mouse, turning it into a ubiquitous component of personal computing.
While mice technology has moved on since the days of Nicoud, Guignard and Sommer, the Swiss made their mark on the history of the peripheral device. Not as big as the World Wide Web, perhaps, but one that has been just as fundamental and just as ubiquitous – and may still be at this very moment gripped in the palm of your hand.