In the 1860s, a politician, printer, newspaper man and amateur inventor in Milwaukee by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes spent his free time developing various machines to make his businesses more efficient.
One such invention was an early typewriter, which he and several of his colleagues patented in 1868. Their keyboard resembled a piano and was built with an alphabetical arrangement of about two dozen keys.
The team surely assumed it would be the most efficient arrangement. After all, anyone who used the keyboard would know immediately where to find each letter. Hunting would be reduced; pecking would be increased.
The QWERTY layout became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters, using a ⇧ Shift key.
