Why is the keyboard QWERTY? The real history
Almost every keyboard you have used starts with Q, W, E, R, T, Y. It is not alphabetical and does not seem logical, so why do we use it? The popular answer, that it was designed to slow typists down, turns out to be shaky. Here is what historians can actually show.
The inventor: Christopher Latham Sholes
In the 1860s, Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer, newspaper man, politician and amateur inventor in Milwaukee, developed an early typewriter with Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé. They filed a patent application in October 1867, and US patent 79,868, "Improvement in Type-writing Machines", was granted on 14 July 1868.
That first machine did not use QWERTY. According to Smithsonian Magazine, its first keyboard had 28 keys in alphabetical order.
From alphabetical to QWERTY
The layout changed step by step over the next few years:
| Date | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1868 | First patent granted. Keys are alphabetical. |
| 1870 | Sholes has a four-row, upper-case keyboard that is already close to QWERTY. |
| 1873 | Sholes and his backer James Densmore reach a manufacturing deal with E. Remington and Sons, the gun maker. Remington's mechanics refine the design. |
| 1874 | The machine goes on sale. Moving R to where the full stop had been gives essentially the modern layout. |
| 1878 | US patent 207,559 is granted, the first documented appearance of QWERTY. The Remington No. 2 adds a Shift key for upper and lower case and makes the layout popular. |
| 1890 | More than 100,000 QWERTY-based Remington typewriters are in use. |
| 1893 | Five major typewriter makers merge into the Union Typewriter Company and adopt QWERTY as the de facto standard. |
Myth 1: QWERTY was designed to stop keys jamming
The best-known story says Sholes split up common letter pairs so the metal type bars would not collide and jam. It is a neat explanation, but historians treat it with caution. Smithsonian Magazine points out a problem: "er" is the fourth most common letter pair in English, yet E and R sit side by side on QWERTY.
Myth 2: QWERTY was designed to slow typists down
This version goes further and claims the layout was meant to make people type slower. Researchers Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka of Kyoto University disagree. Their 2011 study concludes that QWERTY was not designed to slow typists down and was, if anything, meant to speed typing up.
The telegraph theory
The Yasuokas traced the keyboard's development alongside its earliest professional users: telegraph operators who typed out incoming Morse code. They concluded that the layout was shaped less by the machine's mechanics and more by those operators' feedback.
Their best-known example is the letter Z. In the American Morse code of the time, Z was easily confused with the much more common pair "SE". An operator who was not yet sure which one they were hearing needed Z, S and E close together, and on QWERTY they are.
This theory is persuasive but not universally accepted. The honest summary is that QWERTY was the result of years of tinkering, and no single reason explains every key.
Myth 3: "typewriter" fits on the top row for salesmen
You may have read that R was moved to the top row so salesmen could impress customers by typing "TYPE WRITER" using one row of keys. All of those letters are indeed on the top row, but this has never been formally substantiated, so it is best treated as a story rather than history.
Why we still use it
By the 1890s, QWERTY was on most typewriters, typists were trained on it, and manufacturers had standardised on it. When computers arrived, they copied the typewriter. Better-designed layouts have existed since the 1930s, but switching an entire world of keyboards and trained typists is a huge task.
Whether those alternatives are actually faster is a long-running debate, which we cover in QWERTY vs Dvorak vs Colemak.
Put it into practice. Take a typing test, then use smart practice to work on the keys the results point to.