But he was soon forced to change that arrangement, because his type bars responded sluggishly. Sholes’s first keyboard used piano keys in a single row, with the letters in alphabetical order. Ooo oo, I know this one! The answer: sorta. I would guess this is because while the QWERTY keyboard was created to solve a specific technical problem in the 1870s, it turned out that it also inadvertently made typing in general faster by maximizing the alternation of hands when typing the most common letter pairs. Not sure who thought that was a good idea.)īy 1888 the problems of the type bars jamming that existed with the earliest Sholes & Glidden model had been solved, so the QWERTY persisted even as speed became paramount. (Though the Caligraph's spacebars were those paddles on the sides. So even in contests where speed was the goal neither competitor was using anything significantly different from a QWERTY keyboard. The Caligraph's keyboard layout was not quite QWERTY, but it was close. The matter written wasĪs near as I can tell most of the people competing with McGurrin were using the only other major typewriter at the time, the Caligraph. two ladies and two gentlemen - appeared. For example, from the New York Times of August 2nd, 1888: Newspaper accounts of his exploits stress that he didn't have to look at the keyboard to achieve speeds of typing on his Remington #2 that left his competitors in the dust. The invention of what we consider touch typing, and therefore typists who could stress the upper limits of their machines, is usually attributed to a Mr. The Remington #2 was the first successful typewriter, though it was still years after its 1878 introduction before it started selling in significant numbers. This model had a QWERTY keyboard, as would the machine's successors from Remington. What we consider the first commercially viable typewriter was the Sholes & Glidden typewriter, produced and sold by Remington & Sons. In fact, there were no fast typists that predate the QWERTY keyboard. If the claim is that the QWERTY keyboard was designed to make typists slower, who were these typists who were so fast that they were causing problems with mechanical typewriters? Presumably on typewriters not using a QWERTY keyboard?
I'd like to offer an answer from a slightly different perspective. The qwerty keyboard has been so widely adopted AND there was no proof that arranging the keyboard alphabetically makes typing faster, that today it's still the qwerty that prevails. Sholes' solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer.
So, Sholes figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as "TH" and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances.
If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath.
The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called "typebars." The typebars hung in a circle. Looking inside his early machine, we can see how he did it. But Sholes was able to figure out a way around the problem simply by rearranging the letters. Yes, it did clash and jam when someone tried to type with it. The crude machine shop tools available there could hardly produce a finely-honed instrument that worked with precision. At the time, Milwaukee was a backwoods town. When Sholes built his first model in 1868, the keys were arranged alphabetically in two rows. Specifically, the QWERTY arrangement was selected so that letters frequently occurring together would be far apart on the keyboard, reducing the tendency to jam, and thus allowing faster typing. It was made to not jam typewriters and in the process type faster.