When was the qwerty keyboard developed

The QWERTY keyboard placed keys in such a way that the most commonly used letter combinations were spaced out to prevent the rods on mechanical typewriters from clashing and jamming. Fact 1: Who invented the Keyboard? Fact 2: Who invented the Keyboard? Fact 3: Who invented the Keyboard? Fact 4: Who invented the Keyboard? Christopher Latham Sholes. Fact 5: Who invented the Keyboard? We have assimilated the QWERTY layout so much to memory that it is very, very hard to conceive of the keyboard in any other layout.

It is hard to conduct research for an alternative layout. In the late s a study was conducted with school children in Alaska using a sequential alphabetical keyboard on a modified Remington, they equaled the efficiency and speed of QWERTY typists. Recent studies have also proven that using all of your fingers does not necessarily make you a very fast typist, some do very well with two fingers. This has been studied in depth and posits that essentially the mechanical load and cognitive load to reach certain keys, primarily the left hand keys, make humans disfavor using those keys and there is robust and compelling evidence that everything from baby names [11] to how highly we rate products on Amazon or movies on Netflix has a RSR bias [9].

This means that a significant part of our everyday life is deeply tied and biased to the QWERTY keyboard layout that was invented in the s and was cobbled together to more or less sell more typewriters.

It is also important to note that with the recent shift to using primarily our thumbs on smartphones and tablets, we are rewiring our brains in such a way that it may have a deeply lasting impact [9. Some have said that history shows that market share and technical superiority are rarely related. There is the likelihood of "lock-in" to inferior standards. But perhaps the QWERTY keyboard, some state, was designed purely for a marketing premise and not a premise that would actually create higher productivity.

It can even be found in the Encyclopedia Britannica as evidence of how human inertia can result in the choice of an inferior product. The examples of how QWERTY became a standard usually overlooks the sequence of events of history and how markets really are formed and react and act.

The economic theory that somehow winner-takes-all capitalism perhaps the a typewriter monopoly in and of itself created the single reason for the rise of QWERTY is quite flawed.

It was the brilliant idea to train the typist to memorize a particular keyboard layout that fundamentally made QWERTY a standard for better or worse. I have used this example over the last few decades as a deep example to many founders of start-ups. If Sholes returned to see his invention in use at this scale I am certain it would fascinate him and perhaps give him pause and a chuckle. The cause and effect the relatively new concept of typing has had on society is of course mostly positive.

We get to interact with computers using this technologically ancient method. However, I see this as a stop over point to what I call the Voice First revolution [12]. The human thinking and communication work product is speech. We talk in words and sentences not serially in letters. This is the byproduct of millions of years of evolution and perhaps , years of vocalizations.

Humans have been talking for a very long time. You are talking to yourself as you read this as well as I am talking to myself as I try to type this this part I did not dictate using Siri. The only reason we did not talk to the typewriter or the early computers that copied the typewriters is because they obviously did not have the technology to understand us. And some may argue that talking to a computer has been around for a while and it is not very useful.

I would agree. Early adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. However, the operators found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code.

The Kyoto paper suggests that the typewriter keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of input provided by these telegraph operators. For example;. Thus S ought to be placed near by both Z and E on the keyboard for Morse receivers to type them quickly by the same reason C ought to be placed near by IE.

But, in fact, C was more often confused with S. In this scenario, the typist came before the keyboard. The Kyoto paper also cites the Morse lineage to further debunk the theory that Sholes wanted to protect his machine from jamming by rearranged the keys with the specific intent to slow down typists:. If Sholes really arranged the keyboard to slow down the operator, the operator became unable to catch up the Morse sender.

Although he sold his designs to Remington early on, he continued to invent improvements and alternatives to the typewriter for the rest of his life, including several keyboard layouts that he determined to be more efficient, such as the following patent, filed by Sholes in , a year before he died, and issued posthumously:.

August Dvorak in the s. More recent research has debunked any claims that Dvorak is more efficient, but it hardly matters. Even in it was already too late for a new system to gain a foothold. Remington also swapped the R and. The 0 was added fairly early on, but some keyboards well into the s were still missing a 1. The updated Remington 2 typewriter, introduced in , changed this. Not only did it remedy some of the defects of the Sholes and Glidden machine, the launch allowed Remington to sell the typewriter business to three former employees.

Bringing marketing expertise to bear, the new Remington Standard Typewriter Company was able to bring the typewriter to commercial success.