How QWERTY Came to Rule Over the Digital Keyboard
Ever since I was old enough to know the alphabet, I have wondered why the typical computer keyboard had such an odd arrangement of letters. After all, QWERTY is hardly a sensible ordering, being neither alphabetical nor zetabetical. I was determined to find out, though, and kept asking every adult I knew about it. My class teacher took to giving me candy to ensure I wouldn’t bring up the topic again (okay, she only gave it to me twice, but that was a big enough bribe for me at that time).
One Sunday evening, after my mother had had enough of my pestering, she told me that there was a secret mathematical formula by which the lineup was determined, and that the person who discovered it would be given a large cash prize for their achievement. Thus began several weekends’ worth of scribbling in books, converting letters to numbers and using random decryption techniques I made up on my own. I even tried looking for the answer online, and when I found nothing I reasoned that there must a limited number of prizes, so it wouldn’t make sense to just disclose the solution on the internet. Only years later did I realize that it was just a way to get me to shut up and not do anything disastrous during the few free days my parents had.
I stumbled upon the question once again during 9th grade, where I read an article in the newspaper claiming that originally typewriters had the sensible ABCDE layout, which was replaced with QWERTY because it caused too much jamming: People were typing too fast, causing the keys to get stuck. I remember this article clearly because one of my friends threw water at my face while I was still in the middle of reading it, necessitating a counterattack from me. By the time I got back from the water fight, the newspaper was missing, and I ended up never finishing the column.
The topic again caught my attention during my 11th, mostly as a way to distract myself from an upcoming exam I had not studied for (in all fairness, it was a coordinate geometry exam, and every single time I tried to memorize anything related to it I would lose all hope and eventually fall asleep with my eyes open). This time, I did some proper in-depth research, if only because I would feel utterly useless otherwise, and while it didn’t help me get good marks, at least I have something to write about right now.
The QWERTY layout was invented by a fellow named Christopher Latham Sholes, who dedicated most of his life to typewriter technology. After reading through some rather dry treatises on typewriter servicing, I have found out that this genius decided on the QWERTY layout because it separated the most common pairs of letters together, though I was unable to figure out exactly what he hoped to accomplish by doing this. He was not particularly diligent, though, for he left E and R next to each other, the fourth most common coupling in English.
Mr. Christopher was also the first proponent of the non-squared keyboard, in which the keys of one row are slightly shifted sideways from the adjacent rows. This apparently made typing easier, since the buttons did not get in each others’ way as much. I personally don’t see how it helped very much at all, but it definitely looks better this way.
Whatever be the case, he managed to talk Remington – only one of the biggest weapons companies at the time – into a sweet, sweet deal for the manufacture of his typewriter with the new layout. Remington produced machines with the QWERTY ordering, and instituted training courses in typing – for a marginal fee, of course. Typists trained on their machines had to stay loyal to the brand, basically cementing a major market entirely for themselves. The big break came when the five largest typewriter manufacturers merged into a single behemoth, with Mr. Christopher’s design being chosen as the standard. From then on it was mostly smooth sailing – there was slight competition from the Dvorak system, which ultimately never took off – and even now we are still using the same basic layout as decades back.
One thing that almost every article I’ve read while researching on this topic says is that QWERTY isn’t the best possible layout for typing efficacy, especially on mobile (One even went so far as to calling it a ‘festering wound on the typing industry’, as if it was some sort of unforgivably criminal ordering of letters or something.) How do we know that, you may ask. I asked that too, and after some tedious searching, found a study conducted by researchers who presumably had nothing better to do with their time that found that a different arrangement called KALQ system left the likes of QWERTY ‘in the dust’. They claim that KALQ is optimized for smartphones, since 2-fingered typing was not something QWERTY was ever made to handle. However, this whole business happened way back in 2013, which means that the KALQ keyboard must never have really caught on (surprise, surprise). One can’t help but feel a little sorry for these poor folks, spending their precious lives trying to improve typing efficiency only to have their solution end up relegated to being just a curiosity.
So there you have it, folks: the history of how QWERTY came to be. The story of slowing typists down seems to be partially true, though by now I have read so many theories debating the exact motivations behind Christopher’s erratic idea that I fear we will never know for certain. That and all is well and good, because let’s face it: nobody cares, least of all my teacher, especially when he found out my score in the Mathematics examination.
Proofreaders: Mokshit N.
