Quick Facts
- Author
- Christopher Latham Sholes
- Year
- 1874
- Finger Map
- Traditional
QWERTY
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QWERTY is the dominant keyboard layout in the English-speaking world.
It was first introduced to the world on the Remington No. 2 typewriter, along with other innovations such as a shift key that eliminated the need to have separate keys for uppercase and lowercase letters.
Much is unknown about how Christopher Sholes came up with the letter arrangement. One popular story claims that QWERTY was made to intentionally slow down the typist because pressing keys that are near each other would jam the type bars. However, a 2011 paper by Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka argues that this is improbable; for one, the bigrams er and re are extremely common, yet the e and r keys are right next to each other in QWERTY. They suggest instead that the layout was influenced by patterns in Morse code. By placing letters that sounded similar in Morse code close to each other, telegraph receivers would have an easier time transcribing ambiguous-sounding messages.
QWERTY’s lasting innovation wasn’t just its character arrangement, but its establishment of the modern keyboard’s physical architecture: staggered rows, standardized spacing, and the shift key mechanism that doubled character capacity. These foundational elements transformed typing from a specialized telegraph skill into a universal writing medium.
The layout’s success ultimately stemmed from timing rather than optimization by modern standards. By the late 19th century, QWERTY had become the established standard on commercial typewriters, and this momentum carried it seamlessly into the computer age, Long after telegraphs and typewriters became obsolete, QWERTY’s ubiquity remains unchallenged.