ORIGINS: The Computer Keyboard

The only overlap between the 2000's and the 1870's are wood and sleep.  Dairy?  Ours are drenched with hormones.  Our bread is lined with high fructose corn syrup and preservatives.  For some reason, though, one of mankind's most advanced tools, the computer, is controlled by something developed in a time when horse power maxed out at one.

So, where did QWERTY come from?  We can thank Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor who was trying to make a "typing" "machine."  Previously, presses were industrial, with no personal options, and Sholes was setting out to change that.  He was developing, in essence, the first typewriter.  As you can imagine, Sholes had a serious uphill battle to design something functional.  This wasn't a time when you could run to Radio Shack for extra parts.  In fact, you couldn't even run to Swearengen Provisions to buy a block-o-steel.

Serious uphill battle.

When Sholes was designing the machine, one of the biggest problems (outside of physically building each letter, designing the mechanism and defining history) was the simple logistics of the machine.  The paper had to be visible to the typist, for example.  Pressing keys would result in action that pushed a small metal plate said paper.  After each press, the machine or paper would move to line up the next letter.  It sounds like an aggressive piece of pioneering.

With the first design Sholes patented in 1967, the paper rested under the carriage so the user couldn't see what he was typing.  That was un-a-scep-a-bowl.  Sholes continued refining the design, migrating the paper up to someplace useful.  The paper location and the "typing mechanism/activity" was not as complicated as the letter positioning. 

During the six years before initial and final patent, Sholes struggled with a wicked dilemma.  The keys, as they were pressed, got locked up.  It's called typebar clashes.  (Anyone who's slammed a palm on a typewriter knows what this is.)  Again, we're talking about a complicated typing mechanism.  If Sholes did aggressive typing (you know, 10 wpm), the keys would get locked together, making a block of inter-locked letters.  Sholes found the best way to fix this was to spread out the most-used letters to minimize the chance letters running into each other.  For example, you separate the "w" and "h."

Think about that for a second.

That keyboard you are typing on?  It is designed to be the least efficient machine on the planet.  The way it was built was to put the most-used letters away from each other.  Holy.  Moly.  This is Sholes final patent filed in 1874:

You'll notice a few changes between that an now.  First, there zero and one don't make an apperance because they could be replaced by capital O's and I's.  (It made things cheaper to manufacture.)  The X and C have been reversed and M moved since.  You'll also notice no exclamation mark, as that was created by combining a period and an apostrophe.  Period, backspace, apostrophe.  In fact, that was considered an acceptable substitute for the exclamation mark by some right up until 1970.  My lordie.

Remington bought Sholes patent that year and a few months later, the company was selling type writers.  One of the sales pitches the company used was to point out that "type writer" can be typed just from the top row.  I'm sold!

The keyboard has kind of been locked since then, with minimal changes.  The only true challenger to the QWERTY keyboard is the Dvorak keyboard, the only other one recognized by the Microsoft operating systems.  Dvorak designed his keyboard to compete with with this QWERTY mess in the 1930's, but it hasn't made a dent in QWERTY's domination.

So, there you have it.  Keep pecking away at that dinosaur.

The computer keyboard?  Another one of the ORIGINS explained on HAWTaction [hot ak-shuhn].