Whether you’re reading this on a desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone, if you wanted to send an email of your own, chances are that you’d have to type on a QWERTY keyboard, named for the first six letters on the top row. It’s the same alphabetic interface design that people have been using to compose letters and documents for 150 years, and it doesn’t seem likely to go out of fashion anytime soon.
The origins of the QWERTY keyboard are somewhat mysterious, though the most widely accepted story is that the seemingly random arrangement of letters wasn’t random at all, but rather an effort to prevent the type bars of early typewriters from jamming, as was the case if nearby bars were typed in quick succession. The very earliest typewriters, like the one patented by Milwaukee inventor and printer Christopher Latham Sholes in 1868, had featured an alphabetical keyboard, arranged like a piano keyboard, to make it simple for all users to locate the correct keys.
This was soon swapped for the QWERTY keyboard in an effort to separate the most common letter sequences. This means that QWERTY is a purposely inefficient arrangement, yet it’s the one that caught on, with limited changes in over 150 years.
By the early 1870s, the gun manufacturer E. Remington and Sons (which was branching into other ventures following the conclusion of the Civil War) had partnered with Sholes to produce and sell typewriters (originally for $125 each, equivalent to over $3,000 today). The QWERTY arrangement was preserved, and within two decades, over 100,000 Remington typewriters had been sold.
Remington, which had a head start making the first commercially available typewriters, also began offering training courses on their typewriters - a very savvy business practice that ensured typists who learned the QWERTY system would want to continue using Remington brand typewriters. In 1893, Remington and several other manufacturers merged into the Union Typewriter Company, which continued to solely produce typewriters with the QWERTY arrangement.
Other keyboards have been proposed over time, including Sholes’ own 1889 design for an XPMCH keyboard and August Dvorak’s carefully researched redesign, an attempt to increase the number of words that could be typed with the home row of keys. However, by the 1930s, when the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard was developed, the QWERTY keyboard was already too entrenched to be replaced in countries that use the Latin alphabet.
Successive generations of typewriter and computer users have learned to type on QWERTY keyboards, even though there is no longer a reason to stick with this particular arrangement of letters. The same is true with tablets and smartphones, which largely maintain the QWERTY keyboard, even virtually.
To QWERTY or not to QWERTY?
- Although the QWERTY keyboard successfully separates frequent letter pairings like “th” and “he,” it doesn’t separate the common pairing “er.” At one point, Sholes switched the location of the “r” and the period keys, though this innovation didn’t last.
- Interestingly, the QWERTY system seems to favor left-handed typists. There are over 3,000 English words that can be typed with the left hand alone, yet only 300 that can be typed with just the right.
- Not everyone agrees that the QWERTY system was designed to prevent early typewriters from breaking down. In 2011, Kyoto University researchers argued against the idea that inventor Christopher Sholes deliberately attempted to slow down typists. Instead, they proposed that the arrangement of letters originated with telegraph operators who needed to transcribe Morse code messages as quickly as possible, and found the alphabetical arrangement to be inefficient.
- In the early 2010s, computer science researchers from Montana Tech, Scotland’s University of St Andrews, and Germany’s Max Planck Institute developed the KALQ virtual keyboard, designed specifically for touchscreen devices (and named after a sequence of letters in the bottom right of the keyboard). Unlike QWERTY, it features two separate groups of letters, which presumably makes it easier for typing with thumbs. The KALQ design attempts to maximize alternate-thumb keystrokes and minimize the distance between keystrokes. It also replaces the spacebar with two blank spaces in the home row, one for each thumb. However, although a free version was released for Android in 2013, it has yet to be widely adopted.
