A Brief History of the QWERTY Keyboard (And 3 Alternatives)

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On the grassy banks of the Iset River in Yekaterinburg sits a curious open-air sculpture: a set of 104 keys, spread out across 50 feet, and instantly recognizable to the modern eye.

The Keyboard Monument, created by artist Anatoly Vyatkin in 2005, is a popular Russian tourist destination — second only to the historic Bronze Horseman in Saint Petersburg. It plays host to annual competitions like powerlifting empty hard drives and throwing computer mice. It is also said that if you type W-I-S-H by leaping from block to block, your wish might just come true.

Keyboards and computers are very recent inventions, but they’ve become so common that it’s hard to imagine life without them — so much so that the seemingly random string of letters in QWERTY have come to have their own meaning.

However, not only did keyboards in general and QWERTY in particular not exist just a century and a half ago, but there were also plenty of ways they could’ve panned out. In another life, for example, we might just be typing on QWE.TY keyboards.

Though the arrangement of the letters on our keyboards today seems random, it actually holds a fascinating — if somewhat controversial — history. And indeed, the story of the QWERTY keyboard and its maker, newspaper editor Christopher Latham Sholes, offers some interesting lessons today.

Debunking a Popular Myth

One popular myth about the origins of the QWERTY keyboard is that it was designed this way for inefficiency. According to the story, Sholes’s earlier prototypes had typebars — the things that strike the paper every time you hit a key — that would hit each other and get jammed if a person typed too fast.

To fix the issue, he rearranged the letters to slow down the user, therefore reducing the likelihood of typebars clashing inside the machine. To do this, Sholes placed common sequences of letters farther away from each other, as in the case of “th” and “he.”

This story, though compelling, is probably untrue. That’s because “er” — the fourth most common pairing of letters in English — are right next to each other. And, indeed, one of QWERTY’s closest predecessors actually had a top left row that read as QWE.TY, and the R was switched with the period shortly before the QWERTY was launched.

Moreover, typing with different hands, as in the case of pairings like “th,” “he,” and “an” — the first, second, and fifth most common English bigrams — is actually a good thing. It means that your right hand can get into position to strike the next key just as your left is pressing the key before it. A keyboard layout that gives you this ability makes everything so much faster and smoother.

But considering that the QWERTY keyboard actually allows you to type some 3,000 English words on just your left hand (try “exaggerated,” for example, or even “a great wave starts as vast water”) and just 300 on the right hand (like “monopoly” or “opinion”), then maybe the myth holds a nugget of truth. Typing on the QWERTY keyboard can be inefficient, especially if you consider that most of the world is right-handed, and the current design favors lefties.

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The Truth: A Brief History

Though some other theories about the creation of the QWERTY keyboard exist, it is most likely a product of different factors, including the business of patenting and the art of marketing, alongside mechanical considerations.

The Business of Patenting

In the lead up towards the popularization of typewriters in the late 1800s, there were almost a hundred patents registered for typing alone. This number included some early prototypes by Sholes himself. An 1867 iteration, for example, featured a piano-like keyboard that had keys arranged like this:

Sholes needed something that wasn’t just functional, but also quite unique, and worked with his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé to try out different layouts. A few years and iterations later, Sholes went on to partner with gun-making company E. Remington and Sons who, after the Civil War, was looking to branch out to other businesses.

Shortly before production started on what was named the Sholes & Gidden in 1878, the US Patent No. 207,559 was filed — marking the QWERTY keyboard’s first documented appearance.

The Art of Marketing

In the decades since, the QWERTY keyboard has not only managed to survive, but it also beat out virtually every other layout ever made to be the keyboard we know today. This is impressive considering that it was far from being the only keyboard layout around at the time, but also because Sholes is credited as only the 52nd person to invent the typewriter.

The secret, as it happens, is in marketing.

After rolling out the Remington Typewriter No. 2, which was able to print both upper and lower case letters, they also invested in the large-scale training of typists. In 1882, the company partnered with New York’s William Ozmun Wyckoff, who at the time was just starting to teach a typing method he developed to use three fingers — a step forward from what beginners today might know as “hunt and peck” typing. Typewriters were simply too new an invention to even think about something we take for granted today: the memorization of where the keys are.

The partnership meant that Wyckoff would exclusively sell Remington typewriters. And together, under a new company called Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict, they would teach what we know today as “touch typing,” or the act of typing without actually looking at the keyboard. Soon, the new company also adopted Elizabeth Margaret Vater Longley’s eight-finger typing method.

Remington’s typing courses were then rolled out alongside free or discounted typewriters. They were especially marketed towards private business colleges and universities, as well as The World Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), which played a role in the influx of women into office jobs. Businesses, who found that they could get away with paying women lower wages than men, welcomed them.

These courses were so successful that the Remington company eventually opened up typing schools across Europe. Plus, the courses ensured their own staying power: Because they required typists to memorize the QWERTY keyboard to work efficiently, it would be almost impossible for workers to switch to other keyboard layouts, and businesses were incentivized to keep hiring and training typists trained with the Remington typewriter.

In other words, they successfully programmed the QWERTY keyboard into workers’ heads, and by the time competitors caught on, it was too late.

By 1893, the other leading typewriter companies all adopted the QWERTY keyboard into their typewriters, with the layout becoming the de facto standard within the following decade. By 1901, the Remington touch typing method was taught in roughly half of all higher education institutions in the US, and high schools followed suit in 1915.

The Remington course became the standard well into the ‘70s, by which time the personal computer, which itself featured a QWERTY keyboard, was just being introduced.

All this leads to us today, nearly a century and a half later, with phones, laptops, tablets, and, indeed, monuments that feature the QWERTY keyboard.

Beyond Economics: The QWERTY Effect

Like the language we use and the images we see, there is power in the ubiquity that the QWERTY keyboard has come to enjoy in our lives. This is true not just in terms of which company was able to rise above the competition 140 years ago and shaped the tech we know today, but also in more profound ways.

For instance, a growing body of research is studying a phenomenon called the QWERTY Effect, and this has to do with the balance of words that we can type with each hand. Remember when we said that you can type 3,000 words solely with your left hand and 300 with your right? Apparently, it’s more than just a fun piece of trivia to try out on your keyboard.

“We know how a word is spoken can affect its meaning. So can how it’s typed,” explains Kyle Jasmin, a cognitive scientist from the University of College London. “As we filter language, hundreds or thousands of words, through our fingers, we seem to be connecting the meanings of the words with the physical way they’re typed on the keyboard.”

In 2012, Jasmin and a colleague, New School for Social Research social psychologist Daniel Casasanto, published a study on the QWERTY Effect in the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. According to them, previous research has revealed that how hard or easy it is to use an object affects the way we might see it. “If it’s easy, it tends to lend a positive meaning,” Jasmin explains. “If it’s harder, it can go the other way.”

We know that words typed mostly with the right hand tend to be easier for right-handed folks, and vice versa. Across three experiments, the researchers found that not only did this asymmetry affect the very meanings we give to words — but it was most especially felt for newer words coined after Sholes and the Remington company popularized the QWERTY keyboard.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s causal: We don’t tend to like “lily” over “race” just because we have to type the latter with our left hand. But it is correlational and points to more subtle effects shaping entire systems around language. Succeeding studies have shown how this may affect what we name our children down to how we rate Amazon products or Netflix titles. 

Some Key Alternatives

While the QWERTY keyboard has plenty of variations for use across the globe — AZERTY, for example, is common for the French, and QZERTY for Italian — other inventors and organizations have also sought to introduce alternative keyboards, to varying success.

The Dvorak Keyboard

Named after its designer, August Dvorak, this keyboard design was patented in 1932 and addresses some of the issues people have raised about the QWERTY. For instance, it’s available in both left and right-hand layouts, depending on which side you favor, and has the most commonly used letters on its home row.

If, like everyone else born in the last century, you’re used to QWERTY keyboards, seeing letters laid out like this can be a bit jarring. But if you want to try it out for yourself, most phones and tablets offer the option to switch!

The Colemak Keyboard

Designed in 2016 and named after its inventor, Shai Coleman, the Colemak combines the supposed efficiency of the Dvorak keyboard with the familiarity we’ve all been programmed to have with the QWERTY.

In fact, Coleman used the QWERTY keyboard as a base but changed 17 keys without moving most of the non-alphabetic characters and popular keyboard shortcuts. Like the Dvorak, it was designed to make better use of the home row and minimize finger movement. It’s also supported by most major operating systems.

The Maltron Keyboard

The wildest-looking of the three, the Maltron keyboard is specifically designed around the natural movements of hands and fingers.

It’s available in single and dual hand models, the latter of which more closely resembles the standard QWERTY — that is, if the QWERTY had one drink too many.

History at Our Fingertips

Keyboards today are used on a scale that Sholes himself might get dizzy at, and as we continue to develop new technology and ways to connect with each other, it’s likely that the QWERTY will stay with us for decades to come. 

But whether you’re using a standard version or a mechanical one you can customize for fun, experts do recommend one thing: Don’t forget to clean your keyboard.

If you’re not careful, studies have found that they may be home to more germs than the average toilet seat.