The Reason for QWERTY

The first patent for a typewriter was granted to William Burt of Detroit in the 1860s.

The QWERTY keyboard, so called for the six letters in the left top row, was designed so that people had to type slowly.

To ensure this, the most commonly used letters were scattered on the left side to confound the majority of right-handers.

This Machiavellian strategy was to avoid adjacent keys jamming when struck in quick succession.

In addition, salesmen could also acquire fluency in typing the letters TYPEWRITER as these occur in the top row of the keyboard.

In 1888 a star pupil of the Shorthand and Typewriter Institute in Cincinnati entered a widely publicized contest and won on a typewriter with a QWERTY keyboard - thereby QWERTY became so entrenched in the public mind that it is still the layout of today's computer keyboard.

Side note: The famous German encrypter - the ENIGMA machine - had the first six letters as QWERTY. Hmmmm.

My thoughts:

Thank goodness we have had an influx of new keyboards in the past decade! Seriously. I began my 'typing career' on manual typewriters, then upleveled to electric and my typing was always lousy. If I tried to speed up I would make mistakes - oh, and this was when autocorrect was just wishful thinking and WhiteOut was the answer to our prayers!

Eventually, in the '80s, I got my hands on a computer and word processing. My life changed. Really, it did. You see, I could keyboard quickly because the delete button became part of my typing - just as it is right now. I didn't count the number of times I used it...only that my speed from the '80s through today has remained about 90 wpm.

While there are new keyboards out there I admit to being used to the QWERTY system - and as long as it is on a computer keyboard I'm a happy writer :smile: