Today most of us use keyboards, whether physical or touchscreen, to conduct our business and personal lives. We all know the keyboard emerged from the typewriter, a machine that revolutionized business in the 19th and 20th centuries, and you could be forgiven for assuming that the typewriter was invented by a mechanical engineer working for a business organization.Instead, the typewriter was first developed by a pastor at the Royal Institute for the Deaf-Mute in Copenhagen, around 1865. Rasmus Malling-Hansen, the Institute's principal, observed that his students could communicate in sign language more quickly than they could write. He set out to invent a machine that would allow students to "speak with their fingers," quickly getting words down on paper.With no incumbent form factor to mimic, Malling-Hansen had to pioneer his own user interface. According to the Malling-Hansen Society:"Its distinctive feature was an arrangement of 52 keys on a large brass hemisphere, causing the machine to resemble a giant pin cushion. Malling-Hansen made experiments with a model of his writing ball made out of porcelain. He tried out different placements of the letters on the keys, to work out the placement that lead to the fastest writing speed. He ended up placing the most frequently used letters to be touched by the fastest writing fingers, and also placed most of the vocals to the left and the consonants to the right. This together with the short pistons which went directly through the ball, made the writing speed of the writing ball very fast." Malling-Hansen managed to get his machine, the Malling Hansen Writing Ball, into production by 1870. However, two years earlier in 1868, American printer Christopher Latham Sholes and inventor/lawyer Carlos S. Glidden had invented their own typewriter design. They licensed their Sholes & Glidden model, which featured the QWERTY keyboard layout we all know, to firearms manufacturer E. Remington and Sons. Their machines went into production in 1874.E. Remington and Sons had vast capital resources that Malling-Hansen did not. In the end, less than 200 Writing Balls were made, whereas E. Remington and Sons pumped out 5,000 Sholes and Glidden machines in their first four years of production.Today, less than 40 Malling Hansen Writing Balls still exist, the bulk of them in museums. One of them is being auctioned off by Auction Team Breker, a German auction house. The last time they sold a Writing Ball, in 2019, it fetched $140,643.