On this day 140 years ago, Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule were granted a patent for a typewriter. It was not the first typewriter ever invented, but it was the first typewriter to achieve commercial success. James Densmore was invited to finance the invention, and he became the main driver of further development until the Remington Arms Company, which already made sewing machines, acquired the rights to make typewriters.
The initial version of the typewriter had the keys arranged in alphabetical order, but jamming would often occur when keys next to each other were pressed, so Sholes came up with a different arrangement of the keys in an attempt to minimise this problem. Sholes was granted a subsequent patent in 1878 which shows the QWERTY arrangement. The first Remington machine produced in 1874 wrote only in capitals, but an improved model released in 1878 included a shift mechanism which enabled the typing of lowercase as well as uppercase letters
Typewriters were in widespread use for around 120 years, before being substantially replaced by word processing applications running on computers around 20 years ago. The QWERTY keyboard layout remains the standard for computers, simply because that is the layout that people became used to when they learned to type, and no other layout has ever become sufficiently popular to force a change.