Photo: Logitech

How many engineers does it take to design a computer mouse?

At Logitech, the leader in the global mouse market, it took more than 30 electrical, mechanical, computer, and industrial engineers working for two years to create the company’s MX Revolution, which hit stores on 24 August. The company calls the engineering project the largest in its history.

The new mouse, priced at US $99, has a curvy gray-and-black body and is cordless, optical, and decked with plenty of buttons, but the same can be said of other high-end mice. What sets it apart is its high-speed “inertial” scroll wheel.

While most mice have a plastic or rubber scroll wheel that weighs a gram or two, the MX Revolution has a 14-gram chrome-plated brass wheel. Turn it slowly and you’ll scroll one line at a time, the wheel’s internal ratchets clicking under your fingertip, just like in a conventional mouse. But give the wheel a good spin and the result is entirely different: a tiny electric motor retracts the ratchet mechanism and the wheel revolves freely for up to seven seconds. A single flick of your finger sends you whizzing through 50 pages in a Word document.

You can also set the mouse to switch between the “clicky” and smooth modes according to the program you’re using. In Internet Explorer, say, the wheel rolls freely. Switch to PowerPoint and the ratchets reengage, giving you back the more precise scrolling, so you can move through one slide at a time.

“The new inertial wheel—I really think they’re on to something,” says Andy Cockburn, a human-computer interaction expert at the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, who has tried the new mouse. “It’s a tiny incremental development, but to me it’s absolutely delightful. If I had thought about it, I’d be pretty happy with myself.”

Logitech, whose revenue reached $1.8 billion in fiscal 2006, says that the new scrolling capability is more than just a cute trick. The “Revolution” in the name may be pure PR gimmick, but the company showed it’s possible to innovate in a category that hasn’t changed much since Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues invented the mouse in the late 1960s. “Improving scrolling was high on users’ wish lists,” says Erik Charlton, a senior marketing manager at Logitech and one of the executives behind the MX Revolution. In a recent study the company showed that a user’s mouse-wheeling can add up to 8 meters in a single workday. It would be even more if users didn’t rely on the page-up and page-down keys or the scroll bar when navigating through long text documents, spreadsheets, and Web pages.