Where Did the QWERTY Keyboard Layout Come From?

1950s typewriter keys

The QWERTY keyboard layout is so common that most of us never stop to question its unusual arrangement of letters. But when we do look down at our keyboards, we might find ourselves struggling to understand the logic behind the layout: Why does the top row begin with the letters Q, W, E, R, T, Y?

Found on nearly every computer, laptop, and smartphone worldwide (at least in countries that use a Latin-script alphabet), this seemingly random configuration of keys has an interesting history — though perhaps not the one most people have been led to believe.

Credit: Science & Society Picture Library/ SSPL via Getty Images

The Rise of the Typewriter

During the 19th century, inventors came up with various kinds of machines designed to type out letters. Most of these machines, however, were large and cumbersome, often resembling pianos in size and shape. In some cases, they proved highly valuable to people with visual impairments, but for general use they were inefficient, being much slower than simple handwriting.

Enter Christopher Latham Sholes, an American inventor who, in 1866, was working alongside Carlos Glidden on developing a machine for numbering book pages. Sholes was inspired to build a machine that could print words as well as numbers, and he and Glidden soon received a patent for their somewhat ungainly prototype. The contraption had a row of alphabetized keys that, when struck, swung little hammers with corresponding letters embossed in their heads. The keys, in turn, struck an inked ribbon to apply the printed letters to a sheet of paper. It was far from the perfect solution, however, so Sholes persevered.

Five years later, in 1872, Sholes and his associates produced the first-ever practical typewriter. Rather than an alphabetized row of keys, this new typewriter featured a four-row layout with what was then a QWE.TY keyboard (with a period where the R is today). In 1873, Sholes sold the manufacturing rights to the Remington Arms Company, which further developed the machine. It was marketed as the Remington Typewriter — complete with the slightly altered QWERTY key layout. It became the first commercially successful typewriter, and in so doing made the QWERTY keyboard the industry standard.

Why QWERTY?

Here’s where things get a little foggy. An often-repeated explanation for the QWERTY keyboard layout is that it was designed by Sholes to slow typists down in order to prevent typewriters from jamming. If you’ve ever used an old-fashioned typewriter, you might have noticed how easy it is to strike letters in quick succession, or simultaneously, which can cause the type bars to become stuck together.

But would Sholes really have sabotaged his own keyboard layout to hamper the speed of operators? In reality, there is little to no hard evidence of any deliberate slowdown. And the patent that first mentions the QWERTY layout contains no direct mention of why the keys were placed in such a manner. If it was indeed designed to cause fewer jams, this feature would likely have been a primary attribute of the patent. What’s more, at the time that Sholes patented the QWERTY layout, there were no “touch typists,” so no one was typing particularly quickly, let alone speed-typing.

So, why did QWERTY become standard? One convincing and particularly thorough answer comes from Kyoto University researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka. In their 2010 paper “On the Prehistory of QWERTY,” the researchers conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. Instead, the QWERTY system was a rather circuitous result of how the first typewriters were being used.

Among the most prominent early adopters of early typewriters were telegraph operators, whose priority was to quickly transcribe messages. These operators found an alphabetical keyboard arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating morse code. The Kyoto paper suggests the QWERTY keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of the input provided by these telegraph operators. According to the researchers, “The keyboard arrangement was incidentally changed into QWERTY, first to receive telegraphs, then to thrash out a compromise between inventors and producers, and at last to evade old patents.”

In other words, QWERTY came about through a combination of factors. There was direct input from telegraph operators, as well as compromises made between inventors and producers — practical changes made by the manufacturers who actually had to mass produce the product. (The keyboard layout on Scholes’ original prototype, for example, was altered by the mechanics at Remington.) And then there were old patents to contend with. In 1886, a new company called Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict (WS&B) released the Remington Standard Type-Writer No. 2. To avoid existing keyboard layout patents, the company slightly altered the design, placing M next to N and swapping around C and X. This became the QWERTY format keyboard we use today.

Credit: Hulton Archive/ Archive Photos via Getty Images

The Persistence of an Imperfect Design

While the precise intentions behind Sholes’ QWERTY design are at least partially lost to history, there is undoubtedly a strong argument against the popular belief that it was designed to slow typists down.

What we know for sure is that the QWERTY layout is remarkable for its staying power. Despite the development of potentially more efficient keyboard layouts — most prominently the Dvorak layout, designed in the 1930s, which is supposed to be faster and more comfortable — QWERTY has remained the global standard. By the time alternative layouts were proposed, millions of people had already learned to type on QWERTY keyboards, and switching would have required massive retraining efforts for typists, not to mention a lot of grumbling from the general public.

So, for now at least, QWERTY is very much here to stay — at least on laptops and PCs. Researchers at the University of St Andrews in Scotland have developed a split-screen keyboard they claim can increase typing speeds for touchscreen users who type with their thumbs. Known as KALQ (the letters at the bottom right of that keyboard), its layout is a radical departure from the QWERTY system, which has been unchanged for about a century and a half. Will KALQ gain a foothold? Only time, and more typing, will tell.