The QWERTY keyboard (so named for the first six letters in the top alphabet row) was designed by Christopher Sholes, who built what would become the first commercially successful typewriter in a Milwaukee machine shop 136 years ago. Typists—especially those of the “hunt and peck” variety—have been silently suffering ever since.

How did we get stuck with something so counter-intuitive?

When Sholes built his first model in 1868, the keys were arranged alphabetically in two rows. But given the technology of the day, the first typewriter was not exactly a precision instrument. It was a sluggish contraption with parts that would frequently clash and jam.

This happened because the typewriter’s letters were on the ends of rods called “typebars.” When a key was pressed, they would swing up to hit the paper. The problem was, if two typebars were near each other, they would jam when typed in succession.

Sholes had an ingenious solution. Based on a study of letter sequences conducted by educator Amos Densmore, he rearranged the typebars so that common combinations such as “TH” would be a safe distance apart. The resulting QWERTY keyboard did not completely eliminate jams, but it sure helped.

American arms manufacturer Remington was the first company to mass produce the Sholes/Densmore invention. The first Type-Writer was largely ignored upon its debut in 1874, but a tipping point was reached when, in 1878, a second model was introduced with a new feature: a shift key that enabled both upper and lower case letters (you may know someone who still hasn’t discovered this key).

In the decades following the original Remington, several alternative keyboards came and went.

The Blickensderfer Typewriter was designed by George Blickensderfer in 1893. The bottom row of keys contained the most commonly used letters, DHIATENSOR, to increase efficiency. Although the Blickensderfer was more portable than the Remington and featured a removable type wheel to allow multiple fonts, it just didn’t catch on.

In 1936, Professor August Dvorak of Washington State University sought to improve upon the Blickensderfer by arranging all five vowels and the five most common consonants across the centre row of the keyboard. With the Dvorak keyboard, a typist can type about 400 of the most common words without ever leaving the centre row. The comparable figure on QWERTY is 100.

The Dvorak keyboard sounded good, but after 60 years of using QWERTY keyboards, the public just wasn’t ready to change. Besides, a 1953 study by the U.S. General Services Administration found that it really doesn’t matter what keyboard you use—good typists type fast and bad typists don’t.

Our view
The next time you find your finger aimlessly circling the keyboard, don’t blame yourself—blame the engineering science of 1860s backwoods Wisconsin. //