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.

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. 

Green Gemstones

The ancient Romans seemed to believe that emeralds and other green gemstones could be used as a means for soothing the eyes and possibly providing visual aid. One famous example appears in Pliny the Elder's Natural History, where the author notes how Emperor Nero watched a gladiatorial event with the assistance of a smaragdus — an emerald or similar gem. However, historians largely believe that the stone may not have magnified the spectacle so much as it helped to block the glare of the sun.

Water Globes

In his first volume of Naturales Quaestiones (Natural Questions), the Roman philosopher Seneca described the magnifying effect of water in glass: “Letters, however small and dim, are comparatively large and distinct when seen through a glass globe filled with water.” His contemporary Pliny the Elder also noted the lenslike qualities that resulted from combining these elements, although his observation was related to the potential for flammability when focusing the sun's rays through a glass water vessel. While the result may have been satisfactory, Seneca's lack of follow-up thoughts suggest that this particular method of magnification likely wasn't widely used.

Mirrors

In the same sentence describing the magnification qualities of the water vessels, Seneca wrote, "I have already said there are mirrors which increase every object they reflect." Indeed, concave metal, glass, or crystal mirrors could be used to magnify smaller texts for those with vision problems. As noted by Ilardi in Renaissance Vision From Spectacles to Telescopes, French author Jean de Meun wrote of the efficacy of this tool in the late-13th-century poem “Le Roman de la Rose,” although there aren’t many other documented uses of mirrors for this purpose.

Reading Stones

A major development in the area of visual tools came with the invention of reading stones. Often credited to ninth-century Andalusian scholar Abbas ibn Firnas, the concept of curved glass surfaces being used to magnify print was discussed at length in Arab mathematician Ibn al-Haytham's 1021 Book of Optics, which later received a wider audience with its translation to Latin.

Typically made from quartz, rock crystal, and especially beryl, reading stones were fashioned in a plano-convex shape, with the flat side against the page of a book and the rounded top providing a clear view of the lettering below. Initially used to assist the elderly with faltering vision, the stones became popular among younger readers as well, especially as beryl was said to possess magic and healing powers.

One surviving example of such reading stones are the 11th- to 12th-century Visby lenses discovered in Gotland, Sweden, in 1999. Along with providing excellent magnification of tiny text, many of these quartz lenses are mounted in silver, suggesting a decorative purpose as well.

It's unknown if the Visby lenses were the work of a local professional or somehow made their way from Muslim regions where other reading stones first appeared. Regardless, the quality of the images generated by these artifacts, and the craftsmanship that went into their creation, underscores how people were hardly left grasping in the dark for assistance in the days before eyeglasses became commonplace.

Glassmaking Is Thousands of Years Old

Ancient glass was made from three primary ingredients: sand (silicon dioxide or silica), an alkali oxide (typically soda ash or natron), and lime. When combined and heated to 2,400-2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, the ingredients fused to form glass. 

The earliest evidence of glassmaking includes objects such as beads, pendants, and inlays that were cast in open molds, but glass may have initially occurred as an accidental byproduct in the workshops of Bronze Age metalworkers and ceramicists. While archaeologists have found glass artifacts produced by the Egyptians and Phoenicians dating back to the second millennium BCE, current theory suggests that the first human-made glass dates back even further, to Mesopotamian craftsmen during the third millennium BCE, some 4,000 to 5,000 years ago.

The Birthplace of Glassmaking

Researchers have long debated the birthplace of glassmaking, in part because glass products, as well as the raw materials used for the glassmaking process, such as blocks of colored glass called ingots, were frequently exchanged along trade routes. But advances in archaeology and chemistry have helped researchers better pinpoint the origins of glassmaking to ancient Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). 

Situated between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Mesopotamia was well suited for trading its glass materials and glassmaking knowledge. By the second millennium BCE, artisans had developed sophisticated techniques to shape glass and create vessels. One such method, called core forming, involved creating a hollow vessel by covering a mud core with glass and then removing the hardened mud. Core-formed objects have been found in Mesopotamia, as well as Egypt, where glassmaking also flourished. 

Glass trading between Egypt and Assyria was mentioned in the Amarna Letters, a set of cuneiform clay tablets dating to the 14th century BCE that were excavated in the ancient desert city of Amarna, in modern-day Egypt. Not surprisingly, chemical analysis of glass excavated in Amarna found the glass was of Mesopotamian origin. Similarly, the presence of cobalt glass beads in Scandinavian Bronze Age tombs has provided evidence of a complex trading system linking Mesopotamia and Egypt with the Nordic Bronze Age cultures. These findings highlight the extensive trade networks of the ancient world, and demonstrate the far-reaching influence of Mesopotamian glassmaking, even as other cultures began to adapt and develop their own glassmaking methods.

Another historical method of awakening also involves water, though not drinking it in large quantities. In the fourth century BCE, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato notably refined the timekeeping tool known as the "clepsydra" or "water thief” into a primitive alarm clock. Throughout the night, one basin of water would empty into another. When the water rose to the desired level, it was then siphoned into another container, emitting a whistling sound and ensuring neither Plato nor the students of his famed academy slept through his lectures. Another creative yet complicated hydraulic device was the “Water-Driven Spherical Birds’-Eye-View Map of the Heavens,” one of the first known mechanical clocks, created in 725 CE by Chinese mathematician and inventor Yi Xing. Water flowed through its system of wheels, hooks, pins, shafts, locks, and rods; the wheel did a full revolution every 24 hours, and different sounds occurred at specific times — a bell would chime every hour, and a drumlike beat would sound every 15 minutes. 

Clocks using weights or pendulums, including devices with built-in alarm functionality, became much more accurate throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, but they remained largely out of reach for most people. Then, during Britain’s Industrial Revolution, the shift from agriculture to factory work created a demand for reliable timekeeping for more people than ever. Urbanization meant fewer people waking to the rooster’s crow, so instead, they depended on factory whistles, or, for those who could afford it, on “knocker-uppers” to ensure they woke up on time. 

Knocker-uppers were people who carried sticks, poles, or peashooters to tap on windows and wake the sleeping workers who had hired them as personal alarms. The knocker-uppers themselves were often night owls, waking for the day at 4 p.m. and retiring to bed after getting the laborers off to work. Eventually, electric alarm clocks became readily accessible to most people, but even as the gadgets gained popularity throughout the 1930s and ’40s, knocker-uppers were still found in some pockets of industrial England all the way up to the 1970s.