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The QWERTY keyboard
Notes & Quotes
The QWERTY keyboard
Without doubt, the QWERTY keyboard sits right up there as one of the great design icons of the modern age. Christopher Sholes actually came up with the QWERTY layout in 1863, but his first commercial keyboard in 1868 was based on a page-numbering system featuring two rows of keys that took one half of the alphabet each.
‘Whatever key is struck, the corresponding letter or character will be printed on the upper side of the paper, and as each letter is printed, the paper is moved forward by the action described, ready for the next letter or proper space,’ explained Sholes. The most this description could elicit today is a ‘so what?’. In the 1860s, however, it was revolutionary. With two colleagues, Sholes took the model to firearms manufacturer Remington, but it was found that once a typist had got up to speed, the system often produced clashes between the bars holding the letter-stamps. Unsurprisingly, the invention didn’t take off. Early predecessors were also a pretty disparate bunch: a 1714 British patent from Henry Mill was too sketchy to fathom its mechanics, and an 1829 effort from William Austin Burt was slower than handwriting. While Rasmus Malling-Hansen’s 1865 Writing Ball became the first ever commercial typewriter, the biggest breakthrough came from Sholes.
He continued tinkering with the basic idea and, with the aid of brothers Amos and James Densmore, investigated the possibility of splitting up more commonly used combinations of letters. It is a popular myth that the QWERTY design emerged from user-based thinking when in reality the entire objective was to avoid mechanical jams by placing the keys in order of frequency, not to make typing a more comfortable experience. After a period of time in which any rival who saw the layout could have claimed it for his own, Sholes finally included it in a patent for an improved typing machine – the Remington No. 2 (1878) – which featured lowercase letters, and a key for shifting back to caps (US 207,559). QWERTY was now safely enshrined in IP lore, and with only Sholes credited, his legacy was assured.
The layout has few critics today, despite the fact that right-handed typists suffer more than left-handers. Alternative QWERTY layouts exist in countries such as Norway, where specific characters peculiar to a language are required. Challengers to QWERTY’s domination came and went. In 1932, Dr August Dvorak patented the ‘Dvorak keyboard’, which placed vowels and commonly used consonants in the ‘home row’ (the one beginning ‘ASDF’ in QWERTY). It didn’t catch on, and QWERTY has cemented its place as the king of keyboards.
Without doubt, the QWERTY keyboard sits right up there as one of the great design icons of the modern age. Christopher Sholes actually came up with the QWERTY layout in 1863, but his first commercial keyboard in 1868 was based on a page-numbering system featuring two rows of keys that took one half of the alphabet each.
‘Whatever key is struck, the corresponding letter or character will be printed on the upper side of the paper, and as each letter is printed, the paper is moved forward by the action described, ready for the next letter or proper space,’ explained Sholes. The most this description could elicit today is a ‘so what?’. In the 1860s, however, it was revolutionary. With two colleagues, Sholes took the model to firearms manufacturer Remington, but it was found that once a typist had got up to speed, the system often produced clashes between the bars holding the letter-stamps. Unsurprisingly, the invention didn’t take off. Early predecessors were also a pretty disparate bunch: a 1714 British patent from Henry Mill was too sketchy to fathom its mechanics, and an 1829 effort from William Austin Burt was slower than handwriting. While Rasmus Malling-Hansen’s 1865 Writing Ball became the first ever commercial typewriter, the biggest breakthrough came from Sholes.
He continued tinkering with the basic idea and, with the aid of brothers Amos and James Densmore, investigated the possibility of splitting up more commonly used combinations of letters. It is a popular myth that the QWERTY design emerged from user-based thinking when in reality the entire objective was to avoid mechanical jams by placing the keys in order of frequency, not to make typing a more comfortable experience. After a period of time in which any rival who saw the layout could have claimed it for his own, Sholes finally included it in a patent for an improved typing machine – the Remington No. 2 (1878) – which featured lowercase letters, and a key for shifting back to caps (US 207,559). QWERTY was now safely enshrined in IP lore, and with only Sholes credited, his legacy was assured.
The layout has few critics today, despite the fact that right-handed typists suffer more than left-handers. Alternative QWERTY layouts exist in countries such as Norway, where specific characters peculiar to a language are required. Challengers to QWERTY’s domination came and went. In 1932, Dr August Dvorak patented the ‘Dvorak keyboard’, which placed vowels and commonly used consonants in the ‘home row’ (the one beginning ‘ASDF’ in QWERTY). It didn’t catch on, and QWERTY has cemented its place as the king of keyboards.
