QUERTY and the Typewriter

It might seem random when you look at the computer’s keyboard and see the order in which the letters are laid out, but there is a good reason for it.In the first row of letters, and starting at the left, we have the letter Q, followed by W, E, R, T and Y. It is from these letters in the first row that we get the name of one kind of keyboard, the one called the “QWERTY” keyboard.During the 1860s, a politician, businessman, and inventor from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, named Christopher Sholes, worked in his free time to develop machines that might improve efficiency in his business. One of his inventions was the typewriter.

The first typewriters were quite rudimentary and frequently jammed when the typist struck common letter combinations at high speed. To avoid typewriter jams, Christopher Sholes came up with the QUERTY layout, whose sole purpose was none other than to put a lot of distance between frequently used letter combinations. Typists could then avoid jams and write much faster thanks to this keyboard layout.

Chrsitopher Shole typing machine