TOBY SHAPSHAK: Nostalgia for Qwerty’s key role
The keyboard is one of those anachronisms of the mechanical age that live on in the digital era
I was recently asked why the Qwerty keyboard has such a strange layout. Keyboards are one of those anachronisms of the mechanical age that live on in the digital era. Back in the 1870s, the race was on to make a mechanical writing device. One of the biggest problems was that regularly used keys would jam. Early typewriters used mechanical arms, called type bars, to imprint a letter on the paper. These type bars were housed under a cover and out of sight, so when you pressed a key it levered up the relevant letter. But if frequently used letters were next to each other they often jammed. To tackle this, Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, patented a design in 1867 that mostly solved the problem. Working with his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, Sholes went through a number of iterations in the keyboard layout trying to find the optimal layout. The Qwerty layout we now know so well was finalised in 1878 with the Remington No2, which was the f...
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