Ralph Benjamin
Ralph Benjamin · Technology & Engineering
Invented the trackball — the ancestor of the computer mouse — for the Royal Navy in 1946, twenty years before Engelbart; later chief scientist at GCHQ
17 November 1922, Darmstadt, Germany — 7 May 2019
Germany · United Kingdom
Ralph Benjamin is recognized among Jewish contributors to Technology & Engineering — Invented the trackball — the ancestor of the computer mouse — for the Royal Navy in 1946, twenty years before Engelbart; later chief scientist at GCHQ
Ralph Benjamin was Jewish, sent from Germany to school in Switzerland at fourteen to escape Nazi persecution and on to England as a refugee in 1939; his parents were murdered in the Holocaust. He joined the Royal Naval Scientific Service in 1944, and in 1946 — patented in 1947 — built the roller ball, a ball held in a socket whose rotation moved a cursor across a radar display. It is the trackball, and the direct ancestor of the mouse: Douglas Engelbart's device came some twenty years later. The Navy classified it and chose a joystick instead, so Benjamin got no public credit. He went on to design the Royal Navy's first digital data link, still used across NATO as Link 11, and was chief scientist at GCHQ from 1971 to 1982, where he worked on what the world would later rediscover as public-key cryptography.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Wikipedia — Ralph Benjamin; Today I Found Out — Who invented the computer mouse
Invented the trackball — the ancestor of the computer mouse — for the Royal Navy in 1946, twenty years before Engelbart; later chief scientist at GCHQ
Source: Wikipedia — Ralph Benjamin; Today I Found Out — Who invented the computer mouse