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The Invention of the Typewriter
The Non-sensical QWERTY Key Arrangement
The Dvorak Layout
The Advent of the Personal Computer
History of the Keyboard
The
modern computer keyboard traces its origin to the invention
of the typewriter in September 1867. The device was manufactured
for the first time by the E. Remington & Sons Arms Company of
Ilion, New York in 1874 and was marketed under the name "The
Sholes & Glidden Type Writer". It retailed for $125
and 5000 units were sold.
Remington was a manufacturer of guns and rifles. To offset the
decline in weapon sales as a consequence of the end of the Civil
War, it had decided to diversify into farm equipment and sewing
machines. When Remington agreed to manufacture Sholes’ invention,
its engineers applied their sewing machines experience to the
typewriter. Because of this, the first typewriter ended up looking
like a sewing machine, mounted on a table with wrought iron
legs. And, as a sewing machine, it required the operator to
use hands and feet, hands for the keys and feet for the carriage
return.
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The
Invention of the Typewriter
The
Sholes & Glidden Type Writer was invented by Christopher
Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule. However,
Glidden and Soule were soon forgotten and Sholes’ name
remained associated with the invention.
The idea of a machine that could write however went back
many years.
In 1714, British Patent Number 395 was awarded to Henry
Mill, an English engineer with the New River Water Company,
for a type-writing machine. More patents were issued over
the years to many other inventors and it is estimated
that over 50 typewriters were designed before Sholes’
model was patented. The purpose of most of these inventions
was to make reading possible for the blind, the idea being
to emboss letters on paper so that the finger could feel
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The
idea of a typewriter came to Sholes from a suggestion made by
Carlos Glidden. Sholes and Soule had just patented a page-numbering
machine. Glidden suggested to Sholes that a similar machine
could be used to put the letters of the alphabet on paper. The
model that Sholes eventually patented was very similar to a
modern typewriter with one important difference, the operator
could not see the letters that were being typed. To look at
what had been typed, the operator had to open the machine and
look inside. This small inconvenience was soon fixed and the
machine redesigned so that the type bars struck the paper from
the front thus allowing the operators to look at what they typed.
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The
Non-sensical QWERTY Key Arrangement
When
initially introduced, the typewriters were utilized by typing
with only two fingers. The development of 10 finger typing is
attributed to a Mrs. L. V. Longley in 1878. This was followed
shortly afterwards by the concept of "touch typing" attributed
to Frank E. McGurrin, a federal court clerk in Salt Lake City,
whereby typists would type without looking at the keys, having
memorized their locations.
These new techniques, and some famous typing competitions, demonstrated
the worth of the new machine and led to greater acceptance.
However, proficient typists easily caused the typewriter mechanisms
to jam.
To address this, Sholes had an ingenious idea. He discovered
that many English words contained combinations of letters next
to each other in the alphabet, for instance ABBey, DEFEct, HIGh,
etc., which occurred frequently. With the help of a teacher
called Amos Desmore, Sholes determined the combinations that
occurred most frequently, split them and placed the component
letters far away on the keyboard of his machine. And this is
how the QWERTY layout was born. (The layout is referred to as
“QWERTY” because of the arrangement of the keys in the upper
row).
As a result of this rearrangement, the keys that were used most
frequently were not as easily accessible to the typist. Thus,
the QWERTY layout effectively reduced the speed at which human
users could type, thereby preventing their jamming the mechanism
too often.
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The
Dvorak Layout
The
non-sensical QWERTY layout caused many different layouts to
be invented. The most notable one is named Dvorak after its
inventor, August Dvorak, an early ergonomics researcher at the
University of Washington. In 1936, Dvorak analyzed the English
language to determine which letters were most frequently used.
He then rearranged the keyboard layout so that these keys were
positioned on the home row, that is, the row under the fingers
of a typist in the rest position. By grouping the keys so that
the most used keys were closest to the typist's fingers, reach
was minimized and typing speed was increased.
The introduction of the Dvorak layout, despite its efficiency,
was not successful because the QWERTY layout had become a defacto
standard and no typewriter manufacturer wished to introduce
a product that would require its users to have to retrain the
manner in which they worked.
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The
Advent of the Personal Computer
Perhaps
the most attention paid to the keyboard as a human interface
was by IBM in 1984, and was in regard to the compatibility of
the layout of the Personal Computer that it had just developed
with the layout of the Selectric™ typewriter. The Personal
Computer had no jamming problems and its keyboard could handle
even the fastest typist. Therefore the issue of separating the
keys did not pose itself.
Moreover, no attention seems to have been paid by IBM to the
fact that the newly developed Personal Computer, was going to
be used primarily by people with little or no typing skills
and to whom therefore the issue of the "QWERTY legacy"
was unimportant.
Because of this, IBM could have redesigned the layout of the
Personal Computer keyboard to a more ergonomic and user friendly
layout. Unfortunately, IBM missed this wonderful opportunity
and so it is that a keyboard layout designed over a century
ago, for a different technological situation, is in use on over
500 million computers today.
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