Fifth Grade
Worksheets
Qwerty
Have you ever wondered why the letters on a computer keyboard are all mixed up?
Before typewriters, people wrote everything by hand. Then typewriters were invented. None of them were a big hit with the public. There was a problem. Early manual typewriters had keys that were attached to metal arms. When the letter key was struck, the arm shot out to print its letter on a piece of paper held in the typewriter. When the keys were hit too quickly, the arms jammed.
Christopher Sholes was a newspaper editor and printer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He had an idea to fix this problem. Sholes changed the placement of letters. He placed the most-often-used letters all over .....
