But who wants to hear a story about slow progress made through iterative change over many decades? Well, you, hopefully.

The earliest typewriters were built in the eighteenth century, but they were both too slow and too expensive to be mass-produced. Over time, the expansion of the Industrial Revolution meant that more precision metal parts could be created at lower costs, and by the 1860s, a newspaper publisher and politician in Wisconsin, Christopher Latham Sholes, was trying to create a machine that could print page numbers onto books when he started to think a similar machine could type letters as well.

Sholes was a veteran of Wisconsin politics—he’d served as a Democrat in the Wisconsin state senate before joining the Free Soil Party, which sought to end legal discrimination against African Americans and to prevent the expansion of slavery in the U.S. Sholes later became a Republican and is most remembered today as a vocal opponent of capital punishment. He led the way toward Wisconsin abolishing the death penalty in 1853.

Working with his friends Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden, Sholes set out to build a typewriter similar to one he’d read about in the magazine Scientific American, which described a “literary piano.” They initially built their typewriter with two rows of keys—ebony and ivory, just like the piano—and a mostly alphabetical key layout.

At the time, there were many typewriting machines using many different key layouts and design strategies, which speaks to one of the great challenges of our sprawling, species-wide collaborations: standardization. Learning a new key layout every time you get a new typewriter is wildly inefficient.*

The Sholes typewriter was a so-called “blind writer,” meaning you couldn’t see what you were typing as you typed it. This meant you also couldn’t tell when the typewriter had jammed, and the alphabetical layout of the keys led to lots of jams. But it’s not clear these jams were the driving force behind changing the key layout. Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka make a compelling argument in their paper “On the Prehistory of QWERTY” that the layout was not driven by jams but by the needs of telegraph operators translating Morse code.

Regardless, both telegraph operators and stenographers helped shape the eventual keyboard layout, as did a huge array of other collaborators, including Thomas Edison, who offered advice on the typewriter. Sholes, Soule, and Glidden also relied upon outside investors, most notably Sholes’s old friend James Densmore. Densmore was a passionate vegetarian who survived primarily on raw apples and was known for getting into arguments at restaurants whenever he overheard a stranger ordering a meat dish. He also cut his pants several inches above the ankle for comfort, and he happened to have a brother, Amos, who studied letter frequency and combinations in English. According to some reports, Amos advised the typewriter makers on the keyboard layout.

Beta-testing stenographers and telegraph operators were told by Densmore to give the typewriters “a good thrashing. Find its weak spots.” As the beta testers thrashed away, Sholes and colleagues refined the machines until by November of 1868, the typewriter used a four-row keyboard in which the top row began A E I . ?. By 1873, the four-row layout began Q W E . T Y. That year, the gun manufacturer Remington and Sons bought the rights to the Sholes and Glidden typewriter—with the U.S. Civil War over, Remington wanted to expand outside of firearms. Engineers at Remington moved the R to the top row of the typewriter, giving us more or less the same key layout we have today.