Rodents are inextricable from mechanisms with dials.  This we know from the nursery ("Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock") and the laboratory (Helen Hubbert's 1915 dissertation about albino rats, in which a chartometer figures).

From Bishop Hatto, a Legend of the Mouse-Tower on the Rhine by Robert Southey and illustrated by V. H. Darwin, 1861.

From Home and Health, 1907.

"Rats or mice to kill," from The Cries of London by John Thmoas Smith, 1839.

From an 1887 ad in The Pharmaceutical Era.

From In Fableland by Emma Serl, 1911.

Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.  From Epidemics: How to Meet Them by Louis Hansen, 1919.

From The Ohio Farmer, 1908.

From Mighty Mikko, a Book of Finnish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales by Parker Fillmore, 1922.

Here's a precursor to Mickey Mouse, from Beihefte Zum Botanischen Centralblatt, 1913.

"Only a mouse," from Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton, 1922.