Why Is the QWERTY Keyboard Like This? A 150-Year-Old Typewriter Legacy

Right now, below the screen you're reading this on, or on the desk in front of you, there's most likely a QWERTY keyboard. On your phone, tablet, laptop, even on your smart TV's on-screen keyboard. But have you ever wondered why the letters are arranged in this odd order rather than alphabetically? The answer begins in a newspaperman's workshop in America in the 1870s.

The first typewriter, which looked like a piano

Christopher Latham Sholes was a newspaper editor, printer and amateur inventor living in Wisconsin. Together with Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé he developed a writing machine and filed a patent application in October 1867. The patent (US 79,868) was granted on July 14, 1868.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, the keyboard of this first machine resembled a piano: about two dozen keys in two rows, arranged alphabetically. So on the first attempt the letters were in a perfectly "logical" order. That's exactly where the problem began.

The road from the alphabet to QWERTY

Sholes changed the layout many times in the following years. According to the chronology on Wikipedia, in November 1868 he arranged the second half of the alphabet (N to Z) from right to left. By April 1870 he had arrived at a four-row keyboard close to today's QWERTY.

In 1873 Sholes's backer James Densmore sold the manufacturing rights to E. Remington and Sons, a company known as a gun maker. Remington's mechanics gave the layout its final form within a few months. The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, which went on sale in 1874, cost $125 and had more than 40 keys.

What really spread QWERTY was the Remington No. 2, released in 1878. This model was the first typewriter that could type both uppercase and lowercase letters. Sholes's patent covering QWERTY (US 207,559) was also granted that year, on August 27, 1878.

The "to prevent jamming" myth

The explanation you've probably heard most about QWERTY is this: letters that frequently come together were moved apart so that the typewriter's typebars wouldn't jam when typing fast. Sounds very logical, doesn't it?

But the sources are cautious on this. Wikipedia calls this explanation "popular but perhaps apocryphal". The Smithsonian too stresses that the theory is disputed. A counterexample is right before our eyes: "e" and "r", which very often occur together in English, are still neighbors on the keyboard.

In 2011 Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka of Kyoto University proposed a different explanation. According to them, what shaped the layout was not the typewriter's mechanics but the professional group that first used the machine: telegraph operators. The feedback of these people, who had to transcribe Morse code messages quickly, influenced where the letters went. For example, in American Morse code the letter "Z" was easily confused with the common letter pair "SE". The researchers argue that such confusions influenced the placement of letters. Even today, if you look at the keyboard, you'll see Z sits right near S and E.

Why do we still use it?

Today there are no typebars and no ink ribbons. On touchscreens there's no part left to "jam". Yet QWERTY doesn't budge. The reason isn't technical but habit: millions of people learned to type on this layout, and every new device had to offer the layout people already knew.

Alternative layouts have been tried too. The best known is the Dvorak layout, but none came close to QWERTY's reach. An interesting note for readers in Turkey: alongside QWERTY there is also the F keyboard designed for Turkish. This layout, in which the letters are arranged by their frequency of use in Turkish, is close-to-home proof that QWERTY is not the "only way".

So the path your fingers follow every day may have been drawn according to the needs of someone typing telegraph messages 150 years ago. The technology has changed completely, but the order of the letters stayed in the 1870s.

Do you use a QWERTY keyboard, and have you ever tried switching?