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The QWERTY layout was devised by American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes in the early 1870s and popularized after he sold his typewriter to Remington in 1873. Why the keys ended up in that order is still debated, but QWERTY endured mainly because typists were trained on it, making it too entrenched to replace.
There is a popular saying that you’ve almost certainly heard before: “Change is the only thing that is constant”. As you also know, this is true for the fields of science and technology too. With any new knowledge, there will be improvements in every field: from cars and computers to planes and telephones. Almost everything will feel the effects, including us humans. However, there is one tool that has always been constant: the keyboard we use. Almost 150 years after its invention, we still use the same old QWERTY keyboard.
From the great writers of the early 1900’s who wrote their novels on typewriters to the current era of computers and smartphones where email, social networking, and Whatsapp have become a part of daily communication; the same QWERTY keyboard is broadly implemented as the most preferred keyboard style.
But how did this QWERTY keyboard come about and survive generations of innovation? What’s so magical about it that even after 150 years, we haven’t switched to a different keyboard.
The History Behind QWERTY
American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes is credited with the invention of the QWERTY keyboard. Working with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, Sholes was granted his first typewriter patent on June 23, 1868. An earlier version of his keyboard ran in alphabetical order, with the letters laid out in two long rows like the keys on a piano.
That tidy A-to-Z arrangement did not last. Over the next few years the layout was shuffled and reshuffled until the keys landed in the order we now recognize. Exactly why they ended up that way is one of the more contested little puzzles in the history of technology, and it is worth unpacking.
The Story of QWERTY
You have probably heard the popular origin story: early typewriters jammed when neighboring type bars were struck in quick succession, so Sholes scattered the most common English letter pairs across the keyboard to prevent jams (and, in the most colorful version, to deliberately slow typists down). It is a tidy explanation, but it does not quite hold up. If the goal were really to keep frequent pairs apart, the common pair “er” wouldn’t sit side by side, as it does on every QWERTY keyboard.
Sholes’ design of a piano like- keyboard
So what really shaped the layout? Researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka of Kyoto University traced the keyboard's evolution alongside its earliest professional users and concluded that the design owes less to the machine's mechanics than to the people using it. Among the first heavy users were telegraph operators transcribing incoming Morse code, who found a strict alphabetical layout slow and confusing. The arrangement was tweaked over several years to suit how they actually worked, and the familiar QWERTY pattern gradually settled into place. Jamming may have been one consideration among many, but the neat "designed to slow you down" story is more myth than history.
Sholes sold his patent rights to E. Remington and Sons in 1873. Remington reworked the machine, and the QWERTY layout spread widely after the Remington No. 2 arrived in 1878. That model was the first typewriter to print both upper and lower case letters using a shift key, much like a modern computer keyboard.
QWERTY vs. Other Keyboards
QWERTY keyboards remain the default not because they are the fastest possible layout, but largely out of habit and inertia. Over the years several rivals have been designed that claim to allow faster typing, the most prominent being the Dvorak keyboard.
The Dvorak keyboard was developed by August Dvorak and his brother-in-law William Dealey, who patented the layout in 1936. The major feature of Dvorak’s keyboard was that the most commonly used letters sit on the home row, which he argued would cut down a user’s finger movement compared to the traditional QWERTY keyboard.
Dvorak keyboard layout
Experiments at that time showed that users could type faster on Dvorak’s keyboard as compared to the QWERTY keyboard, but those users were trained in Dvorak typing, so it didn’t give Dvorak a competitive edge with regular users.
The QWERTY keyboard, when it came to popularity, was the only one of its kind. This meant that all typists were trained in QWERTY, which became the norm. By the time Dvorak entered the market, people were so used to QWERTY that it would have been difficult for people to change.
As all the current software and applications work based on a QWERTY keyboard, it has become the standard for keyboards. Some operating systems do provide the option to switch to Dvorak though.
Colemak Keyboard
Another alternative to QWERTY is the Colemak Keyboard. Colemak keyboards are quite similar to QWERTY keyboards, which makes it easy for users to switch from QWERTY to Colemak. Like Dvorak, a Colemak keyboard is designed such that the most used-letters are in the home row, therefore reducing finger movement of users.
Modern QWERTY keyboard
As we know all too well, people are generally resistant to change, particularly if it will require significant effort, which is part of the reason why QWERTY is the most widely used keyboard style. People have simply become used to it. While it is debatable whether QWERTY keyboards are the fastest-typing keyboards available, they are certainly not bad and are easy to use. Furthermore, by the looks of it, it seems that they will be here to stay for another century or so.
