I learned this today. The QWERTY keyboard was invented because it made it faster for Morse code typists to type.
A common story is that the QWERTY keyboard was invented to stop typists from typing quickly. The story goes that when typists typed quickly, the bars that held the letters could jam if they pressed adjacent keys. To stop this, common letter combinations were moved apart. This is the story. However, ER are still next to each other, and they are the fourth most common letter combination in English. If this story were true, these two letters would have been separated as well.
It turns out that the opposite is actually true. The QWERTY keyboard was designed to allow people to type faster.
The typewriter wasn’t really invented by one person but evolved over decades. Francesco Rampazetto, an Italian printmaker is supposed to have invented a machine for imprinting text on paper – a typewriter. However, the only evidence for this is one line in a 1924 document, so it cannot be proven.
Henry Mill, an English inventor, received a patent in 1714 for a typing machine. However, again, there is no evidence other than one sentence that describes his invention. It sounds like a typewriter.
In 1829, William Austin Burt, an American, invented a typing machine. With his version, you had to select the letter by hand and then press down on a lever to print the letter on a piece of paper. It was not fast.
There were further steps in the evolution, but in 1867, Christopher Latham Sholes and Carlos S. Glidden invented the Sholes & Glidden typewriter. Christopher Sholes received a patent for a keyboard that looked very much like the keyboard on a piano. It had black and white keys and the letters were laid out alphabetically. It doesn’t have a 0 or 1 because they wanted as few keys as possible and the I and O would suffice. The thought that an alphabetical system would be best because people know the alphabet, and they would know where each key is. They wouldn’t have to hunt for them.
3 5 7 9 N O P D R S T U V W X Y Z
2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M
The first Sholes & Glidden typewriters were used by telegraph operators who were transcribing Morse code. And this is where the QWERTY keyboard came in. Telegraph operators have to listen to Morse code and transcribe it as they listen. A professional Morse code operator can send signals at about 100 words a minute. People can only write by hand at about 30 words per minute, so that was obviously not an option. They had to be able to type on the Sholes & Glidden typewriter at the same speed. That was not possible with an alphabetical keyboard. Sholes reworked his keyboard to allow faster typing. This is also a reason why the legend that QWERTY was invented to slow typewriters down can’t be true because if the telegraph operators couldn’t type at Morse code speeds, the machines would be no use.
He also grouped easily confused Morse code semaphores together. For example, Z, S, and E. It is sometimes difficult to know which letter has been transmitted until the next letter of the word is transmitted. For that reason, Z, S, and E need to be close together so they can be quickly typed once the telegraph operator works out which one it should be. C is also sometimes confused with S, so they are close to each other for the same reason.
The QWERTY system worked for telegraph operators, which is good because that is the specific situation it was designed for. It wasn’t designed for regular typing and is in fact not a very efficient way of typing. However, Sholes & Glidden sold their typewriter to Remington, the gun company, who started to mass-produce it. They also offered classes in how to use it. Their typewriters became common, and people learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard. If other typewriter makers were going to be able to sell their machines, they needed to make machines that people could type on, which meant using QWERTY. QWERTY has continued on to the present day because it is what we all learn to type with. There are better systems but relearning how to type is too much trouble for most of us.
So, a typewriter with an alphabetical keyboard was invented by Christopher Sholes and Carlos Glidden in 1867. They sold it to telegraph operators who were transcribing Morse code at about 100 words a minute. These operators needed a machine they could type on quickly. The alphabetic layout was too hard, so Sholes came up with QWERTY. It was faster to type on and it grouped easily confused Morse code semaphores together. Z, S, and E, for example. Regular people who didn’t need to transcribe Morse code started using QWERTY, but by then, path dependency had set in, and people kept using what they had learned on, which meant companies had to produce QWERTY. And this is what I learned today.
Photo by Dominika Roseclay from Pexels
Sources
https://www.theeditingco.com/blog/10380/the-history-of-the-qwerty-keyboard-how-it-came-to-be
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY
http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/publications/PreQWERTY.html
https://www.cnet.com/news/a-brief-history-of-the-qwerty-keyboard/
https://americasbesthistory.com/abhtimeline1829m.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter