QWERTY

Doesn’t it seem like things we use all the time, we just take for granted, and don’t think much about their origin or original design? You know – things are just what they are – stoplight design hasn’t changed much since it’s inception, US cars have drivers on the left, TV’s have bulky, easy to misplace remotes, mobile phones barely fit in your pocket, two handle faucets have hot on the left, new shoes come wrapped in tissue paper, eggs are mostly sold by the dozen, butter sticks come in four packs, microwave ovens beep when they are done and almost all English language computers use the QWERTY keyboard layout. Looking down at my keyboard the other day, (not only do I peek sometimes when I type, but I’ve realized that I’m always wearing out the “E and R” keys first?) I remember early on that I struggled a bit to understand the logic behind the layout – I wasn’t the best typist in High School Typing class. Why does the top row begin with the letters Q, W, E, R, T, Y (followed by U, I, O, P.) Now, of course, the center row left to right makes sense: A, S, D, F, G, H, J, K, L – perfect logic there, right? And I’m not even gonna comment about the bottom row – Z, X, C … – YIKES! Found on nearly every computer, laptop, and smartphone worldwide (at least in countries that use a Latin-script alphabet), this seemingly random configuration of keys has an interesting history, though perhaps not the what you have been led to believe. Thanks to Wikipedia, historyfacts.com, techcrunch.com, invent.org and YouTube.com. Enjoy!

During the 19th century, inventors came up with various kinds of machines designed to type out letters. Most of these machines, however, were large and cumbersome, often resembling pianos in size and shape. In some cases, they proved highly valuable to people with visual impairments, but for general use they were inefficient, being much slower than simple handwriting. 

Enter Christopher Latham Sholes, an American politician, printer, newspaperman, and amateur inventor, who, in 1866, was working alongside Carlos Glidden on developing a machine for numbering book pages. Sholes was inspired to build a machine that could print both words and numbers, and he and Glidden soon received a patent for their somewhat ungainly prototype. The contraption had a row of alphabetized keys that, when struck, swung little hammers with corresponding letters embossed in their heads. The keys, in turn, struck an inked ribbon to apply the printed letters to a sheet of paper. 

It was far from the perfect solution, however, so Sholes persevered.  Five years later, in 1872, Sholes and his associates produced the first-ever practical typewriter. Rather than an alphabetized row of keys, this new typewriter featured a four-row layout with what was then a “QWE.TY” keyboard (with a period where the R is today). The type bars connecting the keys and letter plates hung beneath the paper. If a user quickly typed a succession of letters whose type bars were near each other, the delicate machinery would jam. As the story goes, Sholes redesigned the arrangement to separate the most common sequences of letters, like “th” or “he.”

 In 1873, Sholes sold the manufacturing rights to the Remington Arms Company, which further developed the machine. It was marketed as the Remington Typewriter, complete with the slightly altered QWERTY key layout. The company started selling a typewriter for $125 (more than $3,000 today) in 1874. It had more than 40 keys and a decidedly counterintuitive arrangement of letters that supposedly helped ensure the expensive machines wouldn’t break down. It became the first commercially successful typewriter, and in so doing made the QWERTY keyboard the industry standard. 

Here’s where things get a little foggy. An often-repeated explanation for the QWERTY keyboard layout is that it was designed by Sholes to slow typists down in order to prevent typewriters from jamming. If you’ve ever used an old-fashioned typewriter, you might have noticed how easy it is to strike letters in quick succession, or simultaneously, which can cause the type bars to become stuck together.  In reality, there is little to no hard evidence of any deliberate slowdown. 

So, why did QWERTY become standard? One convincing and particularly thorough answer comes from Kyoto University researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka. In their 2010 paper “On the Prehistory of QWERTY,” the researchers conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. Instead, the QWERTY system was a rather circuitous result of how the first typewriters were being used.  Among the most prominent early adopters of early typewriters were telegraph operators, whose priority was to quickly transcribe messages. These operators found an alphabetical keyboard arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating Morse code. The Kyoto paper suggests the QWERTY keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of the input provided by these telegraph operators. 

In 1886, a new company called Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict (WS&B) released the Remington Standard Type-Writer No. 2. To avoid existing keyboard layout patents, the company slightly altered the design, placing M next to N and swapping around C and X. This became the QWERTY format keyboard we use today.

By 1891, Remington claimed that more than 100,000 of its QWERTY-based typewriters were in use across the country and introduced an updated model that could produce both upper- and lowercase letters. The fate of the keyboard was decided in 1893 when several of the largest typewriter manufacturers, including Remington, merged to form the Union Typewriter Company, which adopted QWERTY as the de facto standard that we know and love today.

When the first generation of computer keyboards emerged, there was no longer any mechanical reason to use the system—computers didn’t get jammed. But, of course, there was the minor fact that hundreds of millions of people had already learned to type on QWERTY keyboards. It had become truly ubiquitous in countries that used the Latin

Researchers at the University of St Andrews in Scotland have developed a split-screen keyboard they claim can increase typing speeds for touchscreen users who type with their thumbs. Known as KALQ (the letters at the bottom right of that keyboard). The split-screen design, billed as more efficient, was created specifically for thumb-typing on smartphones and tablets. Although readily available on Android apps, this version has not taken off.

When a design depends on a previous innovation too entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist to change (think dozen eggs!!) So, here we are today, using the QWERTY keyboard system. 

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