The QWERTY keyboard is a relic of the past, but today’s keyboards on laptops, computers, and phones carry it forward. Why?
The electronics of our modern devices require regular software updating or even device replacement to keep up with all the technological advances. Odd that keyboards stay the same. Here’s why.
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The Patent
A Milwaukee newspaper editor and printer, Christopher Sholes (1819-1890), worked with his friends Samuel W. Soule (1830-1875) and Carlos Glidden (1834-1877), to create a writing machine. Sholes happened to be the one who filed the patent.
The patent was granted in 1867. The men were happy with the writing machine, but Sholes kept tinkering with the keyboard. The keys kept jamming.
In the original design, the layout was in ABC fashion, but this system wasn’t working efficiently. One of the men’s investors recommended that his brother, an educator named Amos Densmore, conduct a study of letter pairings. Densmore showed Sholes how the keys arose when a person typed common words.
Based on Densmore’s information, Sholes created what we now know as the QWERTY keyboard. It is named for the placement of the first 6 letters on the top row of letters: QWERTY. With the keyboard changes, Sholes added them into a revised patent on the typewriter.
Anyone who has ever used a manual typewriter remembers that the keys do still jam occasionally, but the QWERTY layout permitted a better system for key usage. It also partially reduced the need for typists to stop to reach in to the machine to unjam the keys. (Sound familiar anyway?)
No Keys for Punctuation Marks
The original keyboard designed by Sholes lacked most punctuation marks. There were also no keys for zero or the number one. Typists learned “work-arounds” for these needs. A lower-case “l” was used for a one, and the letter “O” in uppercase was zero. An exclamation point could be made by using a three-stroke combination. The typist hit an apostrophe, a backspace and a period and an exclamation mark was formed. (The keys for M, C, and X were also in slightly different locations than today’s keyboards.)
Manufacturing Rights Sold
In 1873, the manufacturing rights to the “Sholes-Glidden Type Writer” were sold to E. Remington & Sons. At that time, the keyboard was slightly modified by the company’s own mechanical staff. It is believed that the final design was selected because the words TYPE WRITER can be written using just one row of the keyboard. This permitted salesmen to impress customers as they quickly pecked out “typewriter” on sales calls.
Competitive Typing
When typewriters were first invented, everyone typed via hunt-and-peck. As typewriters became popular, “touch typing”—a method for faster typing—began being taught. Soon speed typing contests were popular. A Salt Lake City court stenographer by the name of Frank Edgar McGurrin began winning typing contests. Through McGurrin’s continued success, his touch-typing method and the Remington keyboard layout he used gained popularity.
The Dvorak Keyboard
In 1936, August Dvorak (1894-1975), a psychologist and professor of education at the University of Washington, patented what became known as the Dvorak keyboard. The Dvorak permits users to type approximately 400 of the most common words in the English language with hands remaining on the home keys. This opened the opportunity for faster typing. (With QWERTY, one can type only 100 common words from the home keys.)
This brought up a new thought: Perhaps the time saved with the DVORAK keyboard would make it worthwhile for all typists to be re-trained.
Two business professors, Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, debunked that theory. Despite the fact that with QWERTY, “a” is under our weakest finger, and the most-used letter “e” is off the home row, people adapt. Those who are going to become fast typists will do so regardless of layout.
According to “Typing Errors,” an article co-authored by the two professors, there is no new system that would realize enough cost savings to merit the creation of a different keyboard. Given the number of additional years, we have now remained loyal to QWERTY, I wonder if they would feel differently!
So here we are. The basic keyboard design we use on our extraordinarily advanced technological gadgets was the result of the efficiency of mechanical typewriters used more than 100 years ago. Gotta love it.
