The QWERTY keyboard
Who invented it, and how?
January 20th, 2017. Day 20.
Today’s article is about something we all use, but probably never think about. It’s a staple of the modern writing machine and one of the most important things to learn for a typist. The funky QWERTY keyboard.
Where did it come from and how?
In my search, Google’s autocomplete feature in search even answered my question while still typing my search. That’s cool.
Okay, the answer is very clearly a Mr. Sholes.
Christopher Sholes was also one of the first inventors of the typewriter, the first instrument that showed off the QWERTY keyboard of his invention.
It’s believed that he created this layout to keep popular combination letters (i.e. C and O) further away from each other than unpopular combination (C and V) because the arms of the keyboard would jam when common combinations would be typed together. That’s why C is surrounded by X, D, F, and V. There are few, if any uses, of this combination and this prevents the typewriter arms from jamming. His work was guided by the research of Amos Densmore who studied bigrams, or letter-pair, frequency.
According to wikipedia, it took Sholes 5 years to determine the best approach for this layout, which also included a few changes to how the key struck the paper (either in front of, or behind).
This sounds like pretty good work for the 1870’s and is especially crazy to think that is has lived for an additional 140 years. A technology component that spanned every form of computing device and will likely live long into the future. A future void of typewriter keys and jamming.
And then
Other layouts have been introduced over time to fit particular uses. The one thing that seems to be consistent however, is the extreme lack of change to this format.
Additional layouts like the Dvorak keyboard which is ‘build for speed’ and mobile-friendly layout like KALQ have a following. But it’s a very small one.
SwiftKey has also created a highly customizable, and smart, keyboard that is popular for iOS and Android. It’s more of an app than a layout, and I think this is what the future will hold. Fewer ‘standards’ and more customizations. Maybe one day there will be a CROSBIE layout which is build specifically for the words I wrote most.
To see a list of 10 Android keyboards, take a look at Toms’ Guide.
As we all know, speech recognition, machine learning and artificial intelligence are going to make keyboards obsolete soon. Still fun to think about the past, though!
Note: There’s a “debunking the myth” of the QWERTY story told on Huff Post and Gizmodo, but those outlets just pump out crap so please read if you like to poke holes in arguments for no reason.
Happy Friday!
