Look at the top row of letters on the nearest keyboard and ask the obvious question: why on earth are they in that order? The answer you will hear in any pub quiz post-mortem is wonderfully tidy — QWERTY was designed to slow typists down, because early typewriters jammed when people typed too fast. It is a story with a villain, an irony and a moral about bad design outliving its purpose. It is also, on the best evidence, mostly myth.
The layout's father was Christopher Latham Sholes, a Milwaukee printer, newspaperman and port official who, with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé, patented a typewriting machine in 1868. Early versions arranged the letters more or less alphabetically. The mechanical problem was real enough: each key swung a typebar up to strike the page, and when neighbouring bars rose in quick succession they could collide and stick — worse, on these "blind" understrike machines the typist could not see the jam until lines of gibberish had piled up.
But notice what the fix was for. Rearranging the keys to separate troublesome letter pairings was meant to keep the machine running — to let a typist go faster without fouling the mechanism, since nothing is slower than a jammed typewriter. "Designed to slow typists down" gets the engineering exactly backwards. And even the jam-prevention account is thinner than it looks: E and R, one of the commonest letter pairs in English, sit snugly side by side, and no surviving document from Sholes actually explains his reasoning. The layout emerged from years of tinkering, testing and salesmanship, not from a single stroke of anti-speed genius.
The telegraphers' keyboard
One intriguing alternative comes from the researchers Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka of Kyoto University, who traced the layout's evolution and argued that its shape owes much to American Morse telegraph operators — among the machine's first serious users, who transcribed incoming code in real time and needed the keys for easily confused Morse sequences placed conveniently close together. Whatever the truth, the layout was essentially settled by 1873, when the arms and sewing-machine maker E. Remington and Sons took on the design and put the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer on sale the following year. One cherished legend holds that R was promoted to the top row so that salesmen could hammer out the brand word TYPEWRITER using a single line of keys. Charming — and, like so much in this story, unproven. What is verifiable is the fossil record in the keys themselves: the home row still carries the near-alphabetical run F-G-H-J-K-L, a visible stratum of the original alphabetical layout that the rearrangement never disturbed.
Enter Dvorak, bearing a grudge
QWERTY's decisive victory came in 1888, when Frank McGurrin, a court stenographer often described as the first person to type by touch without looking at the keys, trounced Louis Traub and his rival Caligraph machine in a celebrated typing contest in Cincinnati. McGurrin had simply memorised the Remington's keyboard; Traub hunted and pecked, and lost decisively. The publicity welded QWERTY and touch-typing together in the public mind. The great counter-attack arrived in 1936, when August Dvorak, an education professor in Washington state, patented his Simplified Keyboard, with the commonest letters gathered on the home row. Dvorak claimed dramatic gains in speed and accuracy, but the most glowing studies were conducted by Dvorak himself, and later independent tests found the advantage modest at best. Economists then adopted the quarrel: Paul David's 1985 paper "Clio and the Economics of QWERTY" made the keyboard the textbook example of path dependence — an inferior standard locked in by history — while Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis's 1990 riposte, "The Fable of the Keys", argued the inferiority had never been demonstrated in the first place.
The last irony belongs to Sholes, who never stopped fiddling and patented improved, distinctly un-QWERTY arrangements in his final years — the inventor, in effect, joining the ranks of reformers his own creation would outlast. French speakers got the AZERTY variant and central Europeans QWERTZ, but the family resemblance endures on every phone screen, decades after the last typebar could possibly jam. The layout persists not because it was ever proved best, but because millions of trained fingers made switching costlier than staying. QWERTY is a fossil of 1870s machinery and 1880s marketing — and you will almost certainly type something on it before the day is out.
Quiz nuggets
- Christopher Latham Sholes, with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé, patented the typewriter in Milwaukee in 1868; Remington put it on sale in 1874.
- The word TYPEWRITER can be typed using only the top letter row — the legend that this was a sales trick is unproven.
- Touch-typist Frank McGurrin's victory over Louis Traub in an 1888 Cincinnati contest helped cement QWERTY's dominance.
- August Dvorak patented his rival Simplified Keyboard in 1936; the most favourable studies of it were his own.
- Paul David's 1985 paper "Clio and the Economics of QWERTY" made the keyboard economics' textbook case of path dependence.