The Story You ve Heard About The QWERTY Keyboard Is Probably Wrong

By Debra Kelly on Monday, November 10, 2014

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Fine. I m gonna make a new rule: whenever I m in here, and you hear me typing, whethe
r you don t hear me typing, whatever the f k you hear me doing in here, when I m in he
re, that means that I am working. That means don t come in. Now, do you think you
can handle that? Jack Torrance, The Shining (1980)
In A Nutshell
The development and the popularity of the standard QWERTY keyboard has absolutel
y nothing to do with the traditional story of developing a key arrangement on ea
rly typewriters that had keys far enough apart that they wouldn t stick together.
Instead, the actual origins of the keyboard are a little murky. It s suggested now
that it has more to do with Morse code than it does with mechanical necessity the
arrangement of the letters keeps certain ones together based on how they begin
in the Morse code alphabet.
The Whole Bushel
It s one of those things that s so normal, so ingrained in us that we don t even think
about it any more the QWERTY keyboard. But when you look at it, it really doesn t m
ake any sense . . . at the same time that those of us who grew up with it can t im
agine it any other way.
The placement of the letters seems haphazard, and the usual explanation for that
is the shortcomings of early technology. When typewriters were first becoming a
thing, it s said, the letters on the keyboard needed to be placed far enough apar
t that the speed of the typist wouldn t jam keys that were right next to each othe
r. On the surface, it sounds logical, except for a big problem that s right in the
name. E and R together are the fourth most common letter pair in the English alphab
et.
So either the story is false or the keyboard s creator did a terrible, terrible jo
b, and no one ever really minded.
The QWERTY keyboard was developed by a man named Christopher Latham Sholes. Shol
es was an 1860s inventor, printer, and journalist so if anyone would know how the
alphabet worked, it was him. There were earlier typewriters, and most of these h
ad keyboards that were arranged alphabetically. When Sholes locked down a manufa
cturing contract with Remington, he also filed for a patent for his QWERTY keybo
ard. That was in 1878; by 1890, QWERTY had been well established as the front-ru
nner of the keyboard world, and its design had been picked up by all the major m
anufacturers.
But why?
One terribly cynical (but incredibly forward-thinking) theory states that the se
emingly random keyboard design became popular so manufacturers could also cash i
n on typing classes to help people make the most of the bizarre design.
There s another theory, though, one that turns out to be pretty practical. Now, it s
believed that the QWERTY keyboard s popularity was originally based in Morse code
.
Imagine that you re sitting at your desk in 1890, listening to Morse code come acr
oss the wires. It s your job to transcribe what you re hearing into a telegram, and
it s also your job to keep up with the person on the other end there s no pause button
or rewind, after all. When the series of dots and dashes start flowing, some of
the letters are identical at the beginning. For example, you won t know if it s a Z o
r the code that meant SE until the end of the code itself. By then, the person on

the other end is on to the next one, and you ve got to get the letters down. So
d SE ended up being next to each other on the keyboard.

Perhaps the biggest irony is that Sholes didn t even really believe in his QWERTY
keyboard. Before his death, he filed several other patents for other keyboards t
hat he thought were much, much better than the popular but nonsensical QWERTY. I
n one patent that was issued after his death, the keyboard s top left-hand row was
comprised of XPMCHR.
Not surprisingly, there have been more than a couple contenders for replacements
of the QWERTY keyboard. No one has been able to unseat the rather accidentally
popular version of the keyboard, even though there hasn t been any real reason to
use it for more than 100 years.
There have been some occasional changes to the original QWERTY keyboard, though.
The typewriter version of it had not just a Shift key, but an Uppercase key and a
Lowercase key that would change not just between capital and lowercase letters, b
ut would also change what punctuation was used. And in the odd example, some key
boards made the slightest change to their layouts to keep from infringing on pat
ents swapping out two letters and being different enough that they didn t have to wo
rry about handing over some money.

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