Lexpert Magazine

LEXPERT MAGAZINE | JULY/AUGUST 2016 67 WORDS | DETOURS | Howard Richler's book Wordplay: Arranged & Deranged Wit was published in April 2016. Competing theories explain how QWERTY became the dominant keyboard arrangement POP QUIZ: What common 10-letter word is composed of letters found on the top letter line of a typewriter? … While "repertoire," "perpetuity" and "proprietor" solve the riddle, the clever response to this little word puzzle is "typewriter." Of course, this answer is dependent on using the QWERTY keyboard. (So called because QWERTY form the first six letters on the top letter row.) But why do we have this configuration in the first place? Aer all, it's not as if the keyboard was designed to accommodate a specific typing tech- nique — at its inception in the 19th cen- tury, typing hadn't been invented. While the earliest typing devices date back to the 1750s, the first with a key for every character arise in the 1860s, when Christopher Latham Sholes – a Wisconsin politician, newspaper publisher and ama- teur inventor — created various machines to make his enterprises more efficient. One such invention was an early typewriter, which he developed with Samuel W. Soul, James Densmore and Carlos Glidden, and first patented in 1868. is early keyboard resembled a piano and was built with an alphabetical arrange- ment of 28 keys. e developers believed this was most efficient, as everybody knew the order of letters in the alphabet. So why was the QWERTY keyboard developed? The History of QWERTY in 1893 to form the Union Typewriter Co., which agreed to adopt QWERTY as the standard. While the partnership with Remington helped popularize the QWERTY system, its development as a response to mechani- cal error has been questioned. A 2013 ar- ticle entitled "Fact of Fiction? e Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard," written by Jimmy Stamp on Smithsonian.com points out that researchers at Japan's Kyoto Uni- versity concluded in 2011 that the mechan- ics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design. Rather, the researchers posit that telegraph operators found the alphabetical arrangement unclear and in- efficient for translating Morse code. e Kyoto analysis suggests that the keyboard evolved over several years as a result of in- put provided by these telegraph operators. In this scenario, the typist preceded the keyboard. e Kyoto research also cites the Morse lineage to further debunk the theory that Sholes wanted to protect his machine from jamming by rearranging the keys in order to slow down typists Sholes himself wasn't entirely convinced that QWERTY was the best system. Al- though he sold his designs to Remington early on, he continued to tinker with ad- vancements to the typewriter for the rest of his life, including several keyboard layouts that he determined to be more efficient. In fact, he filed a patent in 1889, a year before he died, that was issued posthumously. So why do we persist with the QWERTY layout? I suppose the answer is simply be- cause by now so many people know its sequences so well and can type without even having to look at the individual keys. Adopting a different layout would be tan- tamount to learning a new language. e standard theory asserts that Sholes redesigned the key- board in response to mechanical failings. e metal arms con- necting the key and the letter plate hung in a cycle beneath the paper. If a user quickly typed a succession of letters whose type bars were near each other, the delicate machinery would get jammed. e solution was to re- design the arrangement to sepa- rate common sequences, such as th, st or on. is theory is suspect, given that er is one of the most common letter pairings in the English language and the letters e and r adjoin on a QWERTY keyboard. Interest- ingly, one of the prototypes had a slightly different keyboard that was only changed at the last minute. If it had been put into production, we might now be discussing a QWE.TY keyboard. In any event, by 1873 the typewriter had 43 keys and an arrangement that was de- signed to prevent these expensive machines from jamming. at same year, the Sholes consortium entered into an agreement with gun and precision machinery manu- facturer Remington, which aer the Civil War was trying to adapt to a peacetime economy. But right before their machine went into production, Sholes filed another patent, which included a new keyboard arrangement. Issued in 1878, it marked the first documented appearance of the QWERTY layout. e deal with Remington proved to be an enormous success. By 1890, there were more than 100,000 Remington-produced QWERTY typewriters in use across the US. e fate of the keyboard was entrenched when the five largest typewriter manu- facturers – Remington, Caligraph, Yost, Densmore and Smith-Premier merged PHOTO: SHUTTERSTOCK

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