You may use a keyboard every day. Odds are, you never think about the six letters on the top left corner: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. It seems unnecessarily complicated to arrange the alphabet out-of-order. And yet, this keyboard layout has endured.
The reason why ABCD… isn’t on your keyboard doesn’t have to do with computers, but with a much older machine: the typewriter. In the 1860s, American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes was working on a way to build a machine that could print letters using mechanical arms. His very first keyboard wasn’t arranged in the familiar QWERTY pattern; in fact, it was mostly in alphabetical order.
1 was released in 1874, and it appears that the new keyboard layout was a hit. 2 still used the same arrangement of keys, and by 1878 it was clearly the standard. Because someone thought the alphabet was out-of-order, and so, the next time your fingers unconsciously find their way to the top row of your keyboard, you’ll remember that it wasn’t designed this way.
As Sholes and his colleagues worked on improving the design, they tinkered with the arrangement of the letters. The reason why this particular arrangement of keys was chosen, however, has more to do with business than with technology. The most commonly cited and probably most oversimplified explanation involves the mechanical nature of the typewriter. Early typewriters used metal typebars that had to swing up and strike the paper when a key was pressed. Pressing two adjacent keys at once could cause the typebars to clash – a problem that was solved, supposedly, by rearranging the keyboard. However, historians and typewriter experts aren’t all in agreement on this. Some researchers believe that telegraph operators may have had a hand in the creation of the QWERTY keyboard. Since Morse code had to be manually converted into written words, a keyboard in alphabetical order wouldn’t have been very useful to someone operating a telegraph machine. Researchers who have studied the early history of the QWERTY keyboard believe that telegraph operators might have influenced its creation. Then came Remington. Whatever the reason, the peculiar arrangement of the QWERTY keyboard became set in stone when E. Remington & Sons began manufacturing typewriters. The Remington No. As typewriters became commonplace in offices and businesses, so did the QWERTY keyboard. Once people had learned how to type on a QWERTY keyboard, there wasn’t much of a reason to move away from it. When computers were invented, the mechanical issue that typewriters had been faced with was a thing of the past. And yet, we still use the same keyboard layout. There are multiple possible reasons for this. For one thing, there’s that whole matter of habit. Millions of people had to learn how to type on a QWERTY keyboard and the system would require asking all of those people to re-learn their typing skills. Besides, manufacturers weren’t exactly eager to embrace the change. The typewriter was a huge hit, and any alterations to the keyboard would run the risk of alienating customers. This is probably why the QWERTY keyboard has persisted long after the typewriter has been replaced by newer forms of technology. There’s also the Dvorak keyboard to consider, but it never gained widespread popularity or acceptance. It was a product of technology and business decisions that happened more than a century ago.
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History cites “preventing the keys from snagging or jamming” as one of the reasons for the arrangement of QWERTY. It wasn’t until the 1870s that they arrived at the layout that we know and (mostly) love today. Even today, our cellphones use the same keyboard layout.
