Look down at the keyboard in front of you. The arrangement of those letters, the strange, unalphabetical run of Q, W, E, R, T and Y, was settled more than 150 years ago by a newspaperman in Milwaukee. His name was Christopher Latham Sholes, and the machine he built reshaped how the modern world wrote, worked and did business. Yet for all of that, he walked away from his own invention for a sum that would barely register today, and died a man of modest means while others grew rich on his idea.
