Why QWERTY, exactly?

I remember when I was a kid, I used to love sketching stuff. Not the usual doodles or random human figures, no- I used to draw up cars and sometimes even smartphones. Strange, I know, but it was one of my favourite pastimes. I probably have whole stacks of notebooks filled with sketches of cars, bikes and tech from my wildest dreams. I recalled one such sketch I cooked up of a phone with a keypad layout that’s arranged in alphabetical order instead of the usual QWERTY. I remember thinking to myself as I drew; “Why are all the keyboards in the world QWERTY anyways? Why not just put the letters in order?” Of course, as a 11 year old, my mind did not linger on that thought for too long, as asking my parents that question just resulted in a unanimous “I don’t know, son”.

Jump back to present day, and the recollection of this distant memory fired up that question again. Just why is the QWERTY layout so universal? Were there any others before QWERTY became ubiquitous? What’s the science and logic behind such a layout? And into the rabbit hole we go.

To understand keyboard layouts, we need to go back to the roots of the modern day keyboard: the typewriter. The earliest versions of the typewriter date all the way back to the 16th century, with several other patented versions appearing over the next centuries. However, there is little to no surviving documentation and patent drawings for the same. Moving up the depths of the timeline, we arrive at the first commercially successful typewriter, the Remington №1, also known as the Sholes and Glidden typewriter. Christopher Latham Sholes drew inspiration from several other layouts on typewriters that existed till the 19th century. In 1867, he filed a patent for a machine that looked a lot like a miniature piano. It featured two rows of ivory and ebony keys in an entirely alphabetical pattern. The top row housed the — 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z keys, and the bottom row contained 2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M.

Turns out, it was a mechanical disaster. Early typewriters had long metal rods connected to each key that swung upward to strike the paper. When Sholes’ early layout was put to the test, typists quickly realized that common English letter pairings like “ST”, “TH” or “ED” were positioned right next to each other. When typed in quick succession, these mechanical arms would swing up simultaneously and collide mid-movement, essentially jamming the machine. Sholes redesigned the layout over almost 30 different prototypes between 1868 and 1873, including one where he experimented with a four-row layout. When Remington acquired his patent, Sholes’ made some final revisions to his design to land at the final QWERTY layout. This narrative, however, doesn’t explain why the pair “ER” managed to survive till the final layout, despite being a common pair of letters in the English language. One of Sholes’ many prototypes addressed this issue by swapping out ‘R’ and comma key, but this layout never saw commercial production. One popular (though debated) anecdote suggests that the top row was intentionally designed this way so that salesmen could quickly peck out the word ‘TYPEWRITER’ as a demonstration without having to hunt through the other rows.

Another theory is that the QWERTY layout was actually designed specifically for the convenience of telegraph operators transcribing Morse code. One supporting fact for this argument is that the first typewriter Sholes sold (before Remington bought his patent) was in 1868 to Porter’s Telegraph College in Chicago. Those of this belief point to the fact that that the ‘Z’ key is next to the ‘S’ and ‘E’ keys, because ‘Z’ and ‘SE’ are indistinguishable in Morse Code, so a telegraph receiver would hover over those three letters until context made clear what keys to strike.

Maybe both theories were partially true. Another somewhat nefarious theory prevails which suspects Remington adopted the QWERTY keyboard specifically because it was unintuitive. This allowed them to provide training courses at a fee alongside the sale of their typewriters. Additionally, it ensured that those trained on a QWERTY typewriter would stick to keeping a Remington on their desk.

Either ways, the main issues around which the QWERTY layout was designed for no longer exist in the modern world. Why hasn’t humanity moved onto finding faster and more intuitive layouts as time went on? The answer is simple: path dependence. By the very tail end of the 1800s, the Remington №2 had become a commercial juggernaut, and thousands of typists had already undergone rigorous touch-typing training on QWERTY. For a rival layout to succeed, it had to be so much better than QWERTY that it justified retraining the entire world’s workforce that revolved around typing.

There were a few contenders as time went on, of course. The Dvorak simplified keyboard made a strong case in 1936, focusing on minimizing finger travel and prioritizing ergonomics, thereby reducing repetitive strain injuries. It set out to solve the imbalance of QWERTY requiring typists to use their left hand more than the right as many word combinations sat in the left side of the keyboard. Dvorak studied letter frequencies and hand physiology to alleviate such problems. While it never proved compelling enough to overthrow QWERTY, many modern day operating systems like Windows and MacOS allow users to switch to the Dvorak layout if they wish to do so, regardless of the actual hardware layout. Another major competitor was the Blickensderfer typewriter which ignored the jamming problem by using a cylindrical “type wheel” that allowed the bottom row of this machine to house the most commonly used letters in the English language. The letters D, H, I, A, T, E, N, S, O and R accounted for 70% of all written English according to Blickensderfer. Yet, all these alternatives failed to take down the mammoth that was QWERTY, established well before its competitors.

There’s no real reason to keep using the QWERTY layout in this day and age. It’s not the pinnacle of efficiency and there’s much more intuitive layouts like Dvorak and Colemak that can improve typing speeds provided you stick with it. But for most people, the effort and time required to retrain the muscle memory for another layout simply isn’t worth it. So, QWERTY lives on.