Ah the infamous QWERTY keyboard. What idiot put this keyboard together? It makes no sense. It is awkward, inefficient and confusing. We've been saying that for 135 years. But there it remains. Those keys made their first appearance on a rickety, clumsy device marketed as the "Type-Writer" in 1872. The name QWERTY comes from the first six characters on the top alphabet row. Today the keyboard is a universal fixture on the most advanced computers in the 21st Century and is thus also known as the Universal Keyboard. The QWERTY has been the bane of everyone learning typing or keyboarding.
How could we get stuck with something so bad? In this case, the answer lies in the old proverb about the early bird catching the worm. As far as the typewriter keyboard is concerned, being first was the whole ball game. It was the work of inventor C. L. Sholes, who put together the prototypes of the first commercial typewriter in a Milwaukee machine shop back in the 1860's. For years, many typists have accused Sholes of deliberately arranging his keyboard to slow down fast typists who would otherwise jam up his sluggish machine. In fact, his motives were just the opposite.
When Sholes built his first model in 1868, the keys were arranged alphabetically in two rows. The crude machine shops in Milwaukee could hardly produce a finely-honed instrument that worked with precision. Yes, the first typewriter was sluggish. Yes, it did clash and jam when someone tried to type with it. But Sholes was able to figure out a way around the problem simply by rearranging the letters.
The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called "typebars." The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. So, Sholes figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as "TH" and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances
He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. Sholes' solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced. Note that all these modifications were made for 1800s ENGLISH. The keyboard arrangement was considered important enough to be included on Sholes' patent granted in 1878.
Thus we have the wonderful QWERTY keyboard used on every personal computer due to mechanical interference. The irony isn’t lost on me…
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