WHY is the keyboard in such a weird order? ...Christopher Latham Sholes developed the typewriter. But he didn't do a particularly fantastic job of it. Sure, the idea was pretty neat. A series of rods--called type bars--hung in a circle, under a sheet of paper. At the end of each rod was a small piece of type corresponding to a letter of the alphabet. When you pressed a key, the appropriate bar would swing up and strike the paper. Pretty nifty. Too bad Sholes was stuck in 1860s Milwaukee and didn't quite have the tools to pull this off. His type bars had a nasty tendency to tangle. The reason: He had arranged the rods in alphabetical order and commonly used letter-pairs were too close together. So he did a bit of brainstorming and came up with the QWERTY key arrangement. By spacing the most popular letter-pairs far enough apart, jams were minimized. Over the years, other inventors devised keyboards they claimed were more efficient than QWERTY. But these never took hold because, frankly, no one could be bothered learning how to type again.