Every year, roughly two billion new smartphones, laptops, and tablets ship with a key arrangement designed in the 1870s to prevent slender metal arms from colliding inside a machine that has been obsolete for decades, a piece of 19th-century mechanical engineering quietly embedded in the muscle memory of about five billion people. (opens in new tab)

Christopher Latham Sholes patented the layout that now sits under the thumbs of nearly every smartphone owner on Earth in 1878, and he did it in a Milwaukee workshop while trying to stop slender metal arms from tangling together inside a machine called the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer. The arms were called typebars. When two […]