Telegraph Operators Guided the Design of Qwerty

In 1981 IBM held 62% of the mainframe computer market. On August 12th, the corporate giant introduced the IBM Personal Computer, legitimizing microcomputers in the office. On that day in 1981 the ubiquitous office typewriter became obsolescent, and skilled typists became keenly aware of that fact.

Because the new technology leveraged the existing skill set that all typists possessed, it was readily brought into prevalent use. That entrenched expertise was based upon an unwieldy keyboard with an inapt letter arrangement invented over a century earlier for the first successfully marketed typewriter: the 1874 "Sholes & Glidden."

The "Qwerty" typewriter keymap (Sholes - U.S. Pat. No. 207,559 - August 27, 1878) is the outcome of an inadequate design process. The inventors were focused on perfecting the mechanism, while the principal business partner was pushing for a payoff on his investment. A human-factored letter sequence was neither conceived nor developed.

Many believe that the Qwerty was contrived as a makeshift "work-around." The prototype machines suffered a high rate of jams due to sluggish mechanisms. The typebars had no return springs, relying upon gravity to return the typebars to battery. The type slugs recurringly became entangled when keys were struck in rapid succession.

The keyboard letter sequence was originally alphabetical. With no hope of perfecting the machine's mechanism in a timely fashion, the letters were reorganized to reduce the rate of jamming, making the "Type-Writer" tolerably serviceable. Home-row retains a long remnant of the alphabetical letter sequence: D, F, G, H, J, K and L.

Researchers have found evidence that Qwerty evolved to satisfy the incipient users' needs (Yasuoka and Yasuoka 2010). Professionals in various fields evaluated typewriter prototypes. Stenographers rejected the invention as a threat to their profession. Telegraphers found the crude machines to be almost useful for transcribing Morse code messages. By late 1873, after incorporating modifications to the letter scheme requested by a series of telegraphers, the layout had evolved into a "Morse code-centric" near-Qwerty scheme.

One example of the Morse code transcribers' influence is placement of the "Z," "S," and "E" keys. In Morse code "Z" can be confused with the bigram "SE" when either one occurs at the beginning of a word. Telegraphers would have to pause letter-by-letter transcribing until the letter or bigram was recognized within the context of a word. They wanted to hover over those three keys until they understood which letters to press, then they could promptly resume real-time transcribing.

Another example of the telegraphers' guidance is the placement of the letters "I" and "O," which stood-in for the numerals "1" and "0" that were missing on the archetype. The two letters were positioned just past the numeral "9" to spell out "IO," making the never-ending task of typing both dates and times easier, e.g., I879 or I2:O8.

In March of 1873, the chief inventor of the typewriter, Christopher Latham Sholes, took a lump sum of $12,000 for his interest in the machine. Sholes continued working to improve the typewriter until his death in 1890. His last patent was issued posthumously (Sholes - U.S. Pat. No. 568630 - September 29, 1896). It disclosed a human-factored letter scheme with all vowels set in the home-row under the right hand. Sholes did not want Qwerty to be his legacy!

The mechanical typewriter was an unreliable contrivance, nowhere near perfected, when investor James Densmore entered into negotiations with E. Remington & Sons. That gunmaker had the skills and resources to produce the typewriter on a commercial scale. Densmore secured exclusive marketing rights in lieu of royalties.

On July 1st, 1874, Remington began shipping the "Sholes & Glidden" typewriter, a machine that was barely usable. After the engineers at Remington had made final adjustments to the machine's keyboard letter sequence, all the letters needed to write the word "typewriter" resided in the top alpha-row. Some historians dismiss this apparent expedience as a fortunate happenstance.

That first Qwerty machine could only print capital letters. Customers complained, saying that recipients of their typed correspondence felt they were being shouted at... LOL. In 1878 an improved machine, the "Remington No. 2" was produced that would print either upper- or lower-case letters by moving the carriage with a "shift" lever. That innovation led to "Shift" keys, making touch-typing practical.

In 1880 subsequent manufacturers began entering a market where all typists possessed a Qwerty skill set. Although a few typewriter makers succeeded in marketing machines with disparate keyboard and letter arrangements, most chose to produce competing Qwerty models. The new technology was slowly adopted and through the turn of the century the industry had a little diversity; nevertheless, the Qwerty keyboard was ascendant.

The major Qwerty manufacturers formed the Union Typewriter Company trust in 1893, fixing the price of a standard machine at one hundred dollars. Moreover, the trust established overseas agencies for various member companies to "spread the Qwerty gospel" around the civilized world. By the early 20th century an international market for typewriters had developed in which diverse countries used the Qwerty keyboard scheme or a variant thereof.

The most notable alternative to Qwerty was the American-made Blickensderfer, introduced at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During the company's peak years of 1903 to 1907 over 10,000 typewriters a year were marketed to several continents in numerous languages. The typewriter keyboard's letter scheme is human-factored. The home-row letters DHIATENSOR account for about 70% of keystrokes when typing English text.

Any typewriter manufacturers that enjoyed success marketing machines with unique keyboard layouts were dealt a mortal blow by the outbreak of war in 1914. Involved governments made the production of military equipment a national priority. Some typewriter makers were forced to retool their factories, switching production capacity over to war goods.

George C. Blickensderfer converted most of his factory over to war production. The inventor died in August 1917. The company he founded was sold off in 1919 and was sold off several more times. The Remington Typewriter Company acquired the company's assets in 1926. A Blickensderfer/Qwerty hybrid was last produced in 1928.

During the "Great War" much of the remaining typewriter production was commandeered to serve the needs of the participating governments. The Allied and Central Power governments exclusively awarded wartime contracts for typewriters to the producers and procurers of Qwerty variants. The value of used Qwerty machines and the variants skyrocketed. The die was cast...

After the massive international conflict ended, a young generation of experienced Qwerty typists flooded the workforce. The odd letter arrangement became the de facto standard; it is omnipresent and entrenched.

Ronald Earl Walker - Qwerty Typewriter Historian