Why has the QWERTY layout endured for so many years? It turns out that lots of myths and misinformation surround its origins, but most theories seem to agree that it was developed along with, and inextricably linked to, early typewriters.
In the 1860s, a politician, printer, newspaper man and amateur inventor in Milwaukee by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes spent his free time developing various machines to make his businesses more efficient. One such invention was an early typewriter, which he and several of his colleagues patented in 1868. Their keyboard resembled a piano and was built with an alphabetical arrangement of about two dozen keys. The team surely assumed it would be the most efficient arrangement. After all, anyone who used the keyboard would know immediately where to find each letter. Hunting would be reduced; pecking would be increased. Why change things? This is where the origin of QWERTY gets a little foggy.
One popular theory states that Sholes had to redesign the keyboard in response to the mechanical failings of early typewriters, which were slightly different from the models most often seen in thrift stores and flea markets. 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 theory, then, the QWERTY system should maximize the separation of many common letter pairings. However, the “e” and “r” keys are right next to each other, even though “er” is the fourth most common letter pairing in the English language. One of Sholes’ early prototypes addressed this problem—the “r” key is swapped with the period key—though that design appears to have been scrapped. If it had been put into production, this article would have been about the QWE.TY keyboard.
In the early 1870s, Sholes and his cohorts entered into a manufacturing agreement with the gun manufacturer Remington, a well-equipped company familiar with producing precision machinery and, in the wake of the Civil War, perhaps looking to turn its swords into plowshares. 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. Form followed function, and the keyboard trained the typist. A few years later, Remington introduced an updated model that could produce both upper- and lowercase letters.