Why QWERTY? Why not ABCD?

As a two finger typist, I have often wondered about what could have been the rationale behind the QWERTY key board.

For the uninitiated lot, 

QWERTY is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six keys on the top left letter row of the keyboard (Q W E R T Y). The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to E. Remington and Sons in 1873. It became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, and remains in ubiquitous use.

Who came first/ The Typist or the Keyboard?

As I was looking for the logic behind the design, a natural question came to my mind. Did the Typist decide the ultimate keyboard design or the other way round?

Surprisingly there are 2 theories regarding the History of Evolution of the keyboard design, each supporting a different option. 

However there is no dispute regarding who invented this keyboard and when? The options are only for Why?

History of the QWERTY Keyboard

QWERTY layout was developed along with, and inextricably linked to, early typewriters.

In the 1860s, a politician, printer, newspaper man, and amateur inventor in Milwaukee by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes spent his free time developing various machines to make his businesses more efficient. One such invention was an early typewriter, which he developed with Samuel W. Soulé, James Densmore, and Carlos Glidden, and first patented in 1868. The earliest typewriter keyboard resembled a piano and was built with an alphabetical arrangement of 28 keys. The team surely assumed it would be the most efficient arrangement. After all, anyone who used the keyboard would know immediately where to find each letter; hunting would be reduced, pecking would be increased. 

Experimental Sholes & Glidden typewriters circa 1873 The World of Typewriters

In 1873, Sholes after redesigning and re patenting his keyboard several times, arrived at the QWERTY. Then, along with his cohorts, he entered into a manufacturing agreement with gun-maker Remington, a well-equipped company familiar with producing precision machinery and, in the wake of the Civil War, looking for new business.  The deal with Remington proved to be an enormous success. By 1890, there were more than 100,000 QWERTY-based Remington produced typewriters in use across the country. 

The fate of the keyboard was further sealed in 1893 when the five largest typewriter manufacturers –Remington, Caligraph, Yost, Densmore, and Smith-Premier– merged to form the Union Typewriter Company and agreed to adopt QWERTY as the de facto standard that we know and love today.

Further Remington’s pre-merger business tactics ensured lifelong popularity for QWERTY. Remington didn’t just produce typewriters, they also provided training courses – for a small fee, of course. Typists who learned on their proprietary system would have to stay loyal to the brand, so companies that wanted to hire trained typists had to stock their desks with Remington typewriters. It’s a system that still works today, as illustrated by the Apple Ecosystem.

Thus QWERTY came to be.

U.S. Patent No. 207,559. The first appearance of the QWERTY keyboard. Google patents

Now to the question of the 

Logic behind QWERTY

Option 1 - The Typewriter/Keyboard decided its fate (Machine came before Man)

The popular theory states that Sholes had to redesign the early keyboard in response to the mechanical failings of early typewriters, which were slightly different from the models most often seen in antique stores and museums today. The type bars connecting the key and the letter plate hung in a cycle beneath the paper. If a user quickly typed a succession of letters whose type bars were near each other, the delicate machinery would get jammed. So, it is said, Sholes redesigned the arrangement to separate the most common sequences of letters like “th” or “he”. In theory then, the QWERTY system should maximize the separation of common letter pairings. This theory could be easily debunked for the simple reason that “er” is the fourth most common letter pairing in the English language. 

By 1873, the typewriter had 43 keys and a decidedly counter-intuitive arrangement of letters that supposedly helped ensure the expensive machines wouldn’t break down. Form follows function and the keyboard trains the typist. 

Option 2 - The Typist dictates the Design (Man decided the fate of the Machine)

The development of QWERTY design as a response to mechanical error, has been questioned by Kyoto University Researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka. In a 2011 paper, the researchers tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users. They conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. Rather, the QWERTY system emerged as a result of how the first typewriters were being used. 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. 

The Kyoto paper also cites the Morse lineage to further debunk the theory that Sholes wanted to protect his machine from jamming by rearranging the keys with the specific intent to slow down typists:

“The speed of Morse receiver should be equal to the Morse sender, of course. If Sholes really arranged the keyboard to slow down the operator, the operator became unable to catch up the Morse sender. We don’t believe that Sholes had such a nonsense intention during his development of Type-Writer.”

In this scenario, the typist came before the keyboard. 

Sholes Further Developments

Regardless of how he developed it, Sholes himself wasn’t convinced that QWERTY was the best system. 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 1889, a year before he died, and issued posthumously.

U.S. Patent No. 568,630, issued to C.L. Sholes after his death Google patents

Why QWERTY continued in the Computer era?

I was then obviously wondering, why this rather cumbersome design continued into the Era of Computers. Computers never got jammed.

But the reason is obvious. Millions of people had learned to type on the QWERTY keyboards. It had become truly ubiquitous in countries that used the Latin alphabet. 

Also, Teletype, the company that produced electronic typewriters and computer terminals widely used around the world, in the beginning, had adopted QWERTY, thereby ensuring its place as the new technological standard.

Competitors for QWERTY

Although, from time to time, there were competitors for QWERTY, the noteworthy ones are

Dvorak Simplified Keyboard

Developed by Dr. August Dvorak in the 1930s, Dvorak users reported faster and more accurate typing, in part because the system dramatically increases the number of words that can be typed using the “home” row of keys where your fingers naturally rest – also known as the keys you type when you’re just trying fill space. asjdfkal; sdfjkl; asdfjkl; asdfjkl; dkadsf. asdfjklasdfjk. 

But even in 1930 it was already too late for a new system to gain a foothold. While Dvorak certainly has its champions, it never gained enough of a following to overthrow King QWERTY. After all, the world learned to type using Remington’s keyboard.

Dvorak simplified Keyboard

KALQ  Keyboard

When a design depends on a previous innovation too entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist to change, it’s known as a path dependency. The new KALQ keyboard attempts to break from the tyranny of Christopher Latham Sholes, whose QWERTY system makes even less sense on the virtual keyboards of tablets and smartphones than it does on a computer keyboards. 

It has been designed around a very specific, very modern behavior – typing with thumbs. Like the telegraph operator QWERTY theory, the user is determining the structure of the keyboard. 

The KALQ keyboard (dubbed after the order the keys appear in the keyboard, analogous to QWERTY) is a keyboard layout that has been developed by researchers at the Montana Tech, University of St Andrews and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics as a split-screen keyboard for thumb-typing, which is claimed to allow a 34% increase in speed of typing for the people who use touchscreen. KALQ was released as a free app, albeit a beta, for Android-based smartphones. Although the KALQ project received some buzz in tech media, as of early 2017, the latest public version is dated October 2013, and still labelled a beta.

KALQ - For Thumb typing

In Conclusion....

Almost any system that has been developed wrt to Keyboard design (including the KALQ) , seems to be a product of path dependency. Because no matter how the letters are arranged, the basic notion of individually separated letters distributed across a grid dates back to Sholes and co. tinkering away in their Milwaukee workshops. Which does not meet any requirements of a tablet or Smartphone.

Which leads one to 2 more questions

• Is it at all possible to have a faster, more intuitive, more user friendly keyboard design? Would we have to start from scratch then? Preferably someone who has never used a keyboard to minimise influences?
• Why is our cutting edge technology, developing in leaps and bounds, still basing its design of a core Input component on something that dates more than 150 years ago, when design was a different ball game altogether?

Truly, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Thanx to

• Google, Wikepedia and umpteen sites and specifically
• Fact of Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard - Jimmy Stamp