![]() And to further complicate things, the layout of the keyboard that people press to type did not have to exactly match the layout of the typebars that struck the paper. So the jamming issue documented in the historical record may not be related to the letter arrangement at all, but from misuse of the typewriter.Īlso, a contradicting statistical study in 1949 showed that the QWERTY layout in the type basket (the layout of the typebars in a circle where they strike the paper) of the production 1874 model used more close-in-proximity typebars theoretically prone to clash (26%) than a completely random layout (22%). While it’s true that the early typewriter prototypes did jam (according to this first-hand 1918 account), later QWERTY typewriters jammed too if you pushed too many keys at once-this is one of the reasons the inventors quickly transitioned away from a piano keyboard, which made early testers think they could push multiple keys at once. Other than the “ER” combination, analysis has shown that in general, the QWERTY layout does separate the most frequently-used letter combinations fairly well, at least as understood in 1874.īut it’s still not a slam dunk. But if you look back, the original “QWE.TY” layout had placed the “R” in a different location. Yeah, the period was in the place of the ‘R’ key.So if they didn’t want to slow typists down, the inventors still could have been trying to prevent jams during speedy usage by spreading out frequently-used letter combinations like “TH.” Some critics have attacked this by pointing out that the letter combination “ER” is one of the most frequently used in English, and yet those two letters are right there, side-by-side, in the QWERTY layout. See, early prototypes of Sholes’ typewriters reportedly showed a slightly different keyboard layout, where the “R” key was not there at the top row. However, an anomaly of Sholes’ new layout is still a mystery to historians. Hence, if this theory is true, then the QWERTY layout is one such layout that put the keys of the most common letter pairings such as “t h”, “i n”, “h e”, and others most apart from each other.Īn Unusual Decision By Christopher Latham Sholes So, to prevent the mechanical lock-up of typewriter keys, Sholes came up with the idea of placing the most-used pairs of letters, as per the Bigram Frequency usage, apart from each other. ![]() It happened mainly due to the succession of the adjacent often-used keys on the Bigram Frequency of usage.įor the uninitiated, Bigram Frequency usage is a technique of statistical language identification that clearly shows the most-paired letters of the alphabet (picture below). So, when a typist typed a word with the keys that are on the same type bar, the striker of the keys would often get jammed with each other, causing a mechanical lock-up on the typewriter. Underneath the keys of a typewriter, there are hammer-like inked strikers which sit adjacent to each other on a type-bar. Now, to understand this, first, we need to learn how a typewriter works. ![]() So, how did Sholes move from the logical alphabetical layout to the current haphazard QWERTY layout? Well, one of the most popular theories is that the inventor created the QWERTY layout to prevent typewriter keys from a mechanical lock-up. The latter model had four rows of keys laid out in almost alphabetical order. As per Scholes’ typed letters and patent filings, the keyboard layout of these typewriters was not nearly close to the current QWERTY layout. Two years later, in 1870, Matthias Schwalbach worked with Sholes to develop a 38-key typewriter, including special keys for hyphen, comma, period, and the question mark. ![]() ![]() The origin of the QWERTY keyboard layout directly connects to the working of the typewriter.īack in November 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes, along with his three colleagues, shipped the first 28-key typewriter to the Porter’s Telegraph College in Chicago. Now, to know about the said keyboard layout, we have to go to the pre-computer days when the typewriter was a revolutionary device for typists around the world. ![]()
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