QWERTY

Look down from the computer screen onto the keyboard and think. Q-W-E-R-T-Y. How did this pattern of letters become part of our language? It seems so random, not alphabetic and rather illogical. Yet it is also hardwired into tens of millions of brains and hundreds of millions of fingers around the world. It is pretty much unchanged since it was standardized in the 1870s. So how did we end up with Qwerty? In the USA after the civil war era it became very popular to standardize everything. The new world was to be a mechanical one. A .22 bullet had to fit any .22 gun or rifle in the world. A typist had to be able to write on any typewriter. There was hot competition to create a single typewriter standard. The inventor of the Qwerty keyboard was Christopher Sholes, a Milwaukee port official, Wisconsin senator, newspaper editor and a manwho tried to invent not‘a’typewriting machine, but‘the’typewriting machine. The challenge was mechanical; to invent a system which connected easy use with the complicated technology of ink, metal keys and springs. His first attempt was alphabetical, but the type bars hit each other due to the key order. So Sholes changed them in a way to make the machine work. Frequency and combinations of letters had to be considered to prevent keys hitting each other. The typewriter wars were powered by typing competitions, where typists would battle it out to achieve the highest word counts. Not surprisingly, type would hit each other and stick. So Sholes, it is said, reorganized the letters on his machine in order to keep speeds down. In 1873, Qwerty was adopted by Remington, famous for its arms and sewing machines as well as its typewriters, and it became adopted as the basis not only for English but the majority of European languages as well. In the early 1930s, time and motion expert August Dvorak made Qwerty less important by producing some empirical evidence proving that it’s not the best system. As an alternative, he produced an ergonomically designed keyboard which could have meant the end of Qwerty. Dvorak users reported faster, more accurate typing and fewer keys hitting each other. But it was too late. Just as AC beat DC, the audio cassette beat 8-track and VHS beat Betamax, Qwerty won the format war. Typewriters with the familiar layout were already used in offices around the world. With Qwerty came standardization and compatibility. And, although there may be more efficient keyboards, these offer only very small improvements. If users are truly looking forspeed and accuracy,they could considerstenotypes used by stenographers in courtrooms. These machines have 22 keys and are capable of typing at the speed of speech, around 180 words per minute, or three words every second.