![]() According to typewritten letters and patents of Sholes, the keyboard consisted of four rows, nearly in alphabetical order, but the “u” was next to “o”. By April, 1870 Matthias Schwalbach helped Sholes design a new typewriter with 38 keys, which consisted of capitals, numerals 2 to 9, hyphen, comma, period, and question mark. In November, 1868 Christopher Latham Sholes and his colleagues, Carlos Glidden, Samuel Willard Soulé, and James Densmore, in Milwaukee shipped out their first 28 key piano style keyboard-like typewriter to Porter’s Telegraph College in Chicago, primarily to transcribe telegraph messages. But why the QWERTY standard and not sequential alphabetical or any of the other keyboard layouts being developed by competing typewriter manufactures? Although the typewriter has a history that predates the QWERTY layout, it was a confluence of elements that gave rise to Remington winning the early typewriter standard. The rise of the industrial age to the office age in the United States closely aligns with the rise of the typewriter. Like many things in history, the QWERTY layout had fundamental contributing elements that became obscured across the span of time. This idea of the typewriter predates the office use that ultimately made it a standard business machine. Are we going to keep that layout going? Perhaps QWERTY will always be good enough.The typewriter was heralded as a new way to write with greater speed, fluency and readability. The calling card of the personal computer was the keyboard, and now, we are carrying around pieces of glass on which we simulate the old QWERTY design. ![]() Keyboard configurations are newly important as we think about how we should type on tablets and other devices. But the development of the design wasn't accidental or silly: it was complex, evolutionary, and quite sensible for Morse operators. QWERTY is still an example of technological momentum. That is to say, the lesson of the QWERTY story remains the resilience of a design created for an outmoded technology's dictates. The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of input provided by these telegraph operators. However, the operators found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. Rather, the QWERTY system emerged as a result of how the first typewriters were being used. ![]() They conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. The researchers tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users. The layout changed often from the early alphabetical arrangement, before the final configuration came into being. Rather, it formed over time as telegraph operators used the machines to transcribe Morse code. The QWERTY keyboard did not spring fully formed from Christopher Sholes, the first person to file a typewriter patent with the layout. But Jimmy Stamp over at Smithsonian points to evidence released by Japanese researchers that, in fact, the story is bunk. So many times, I had assumed it was true. Since then, I've heard this story repeated a thousand times. The modern keyboard, I was told, was a holdover of the mechanical age. You see, in the olden days, mechanical typewriters could jam if people hit the keys too quickly, so they had to put the common letters far apart from each other. That layout was called QWERTY, he explained, and it had been created to slow typists down. Ward took me aside (or maybe he told the whole class, it was a long time ago) to tell me about the wonders of Dvorak, a different keyboard layout that was scientifically designed to be more efficient than the standard layout. ![]() The first time I heard the lie, I was in fifth grade. ![]()
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