The QWERTY Keyboard on This Day in History

 

This day in history: On this day in 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes received a patent for the typewriter, and we still use his QWERTY keyboard to this day. 

"The weirdest thing about the evolution of the QWERTY keyboard layout is that no one knows for certain why the layout took the shape it did. It’s a genuine mystery, despite many seemingly authoritative sources writing to the contrary. In a comprehensive 1983 paper titled The QWERTY Keyboard: A Review, Jan Noyes wrote, 'There appears … to be no obvious reason for the placement of letters in the QWERTY layout, and doubts concerning its origin still remain...the exact meaning behind most of the letter positions within the layout itself has been lost to history. None of the keyboard’s inventors left a record explaining the layout before they died. 'The origin is obscure and the historians disagree,' wrote Roy T. Griffith in 1949. As a result, it’s been the subject of frequent speculation for the past 100 years.'” Source

Others maintain that the DVORAK keyboard is superior. DVORAK is a keyboard layout designed to minimize movement, and make typing as easy and painless as possible. The idea behind it is to have the most commonly typed keys under the fingers, and make it as easy as possible to type common words and combinations of letters. To give an impressions of just how big a difference this makes, consider that the average Dvorak typist's fingers will travel about one mile in a day of typing. A Qwerty typist's will travel anything from 16 to 20 miles.

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