Typewriter   1898

Ever wonder why the letters on your computer keypad aren't in logical order? That first line - QWERTY - doesn't make any sense at all. Until you think back to the forerunner of the keypad - the typewriter. In 1898, a man named Christopher Latham Sholes took out a patent on the set-up for this nifty invention that freed people from the drudgery of writing everything out by hand. Sholes lined the letters up in this new way to keep the most frequently used keys from jamming together when a really fast typist was at work. The typewriter has pretty well been overtaken by the computer, but Mr. Sholes' QWERTY keyboard is still with us today.