The History of The QWERTY Keyboard

The QWERTY design was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873, when it first appeared in typewriters. The QWERTY keyboard is also a commonly used nickname to name the English language keyboard.

Misleading stories abound that Qwerty was designed to improve efficiency, performance or to create a “home row”; who spread them? And what really happened?

In 1714 Henry Mill took out the first patent (number 385) for a typewriter in England. Most of the 100+ early attempts at typewriters were in ABC order, and some to enable the blind to write. Then Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA, invented a typewriter in September 1867. As with previous attempts the keys were in an ABCDEFG layout, and the typists soon got too fast and jammed the keys. The key levers hit the platen from underneath and then fell back down under gravity. He didn’t think to put return springs on to fix the problem.

Instead he solved this by asking his brother in law to devise a different layout of the keys. Publicly he said it was to put the most commonly used letters far apart on the keyboard to reduce the chances of the levers jamming. The result was Qwerty (the Qwerty layout).”