A USEFUL KEYBOARD LAYOUT

On July 08, 2008 in General

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How many words exist that start with the alphabet ‘Q’ that is followed by a consonant? The answer is only one that came into common use in 1929 and first revealed in the Figure 3 of US Patent 207,559 awarded to Christopher Latham Sholes in 1878. The word happens to be QWERTY, the reference to the layout of the keyboard as we know it today, so named because of the first six letters in the top alphabet row. The word makes no sense, and sounds rather awkward. But it is, as all of us know, is here to stay. So how did this awkward sounding, and seemingly random set of alphabets, come to being in the first place? In fact, why is the keyboard arranged in an awkward manner, when the alphabets are arranged in a different manner?

Originally, the keys on a typewriter were arranged alphabetically in two rows. The crude machine shop tools available in a small backwoods town like Milwaukee where Christopher Sholes was living could hardly produce a finely-honed instrument that worked with precision, and the typewriter was no exception. The first typewriters had its letters on the end of rods called “typebars.” The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. So when someone was typing too fast or even pressed two closely placed keys simultaneously, it clashed and jammed.

Sholes worked on this problem, and in 1868 was able to figure out a way around the problem simply by rearranging the letters. He figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as “TH” and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances. He studied the letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes’ chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. Sholes’ solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced.

The keyboard arrangement was considered important enough to be included on Sholes’ patent granted in 1878 (filed in 1875 or 1873- the author couldn’t make it out properly from the image available on USPTO website), some years after the machine was into production. QWERTY’s effect, by reducing those annoying clashes, was to speed up typing.

Sholes and Densmore went to Remington, the arms manufacturer, to have their machines mass-produced. In 1874, the first Type-Writer appeared on the market. No contemporary account complains about the illogical keyboard. In fact, few contemporary accounts even mention the machine at all. At its debut, it was largely ignored. Sales of the typewriter did not take off until after Remington’s second model was introduced in 1878, offering the only major modification to the keyboard as we know it today. The first machines typed only capital letters. The new Remington No. 2 offered both upper and lower case by adding the familiar shift key. It is called a shift because it actually caused the carriage to shift in position for printing either of two letters on each typebar. Modern electronic machines no longer shift mechanically when the shift key is pressed, but its name remains the same.

Subsequently, in 1932, August Dvorak of Washington State University designed a different keyboard, wherein home row uses all five vowels and the five most common consonants: AOEUIDHTNS so that with the vowels on one side and consonants on the other, a rough typing rhythm would be established as each hand would tend to alternate. With the Dvorak keyboard, a typist can type about 400 of the English language’s most common words without ever leaving the home row. The comparable figure on QWERTY is 100. The home row letters on Dvorak do a total of 70% of the work, whereas on QWERTY they do only 32%. However, the practical superiority of Dvorak’s keyboard was never established, and it never caught on. So QWERTY remained as the preferred layout of keyboards.

On a related note, Mark-Jason Dominus, a leading Perl programmer has helpfully provided a QWERTY-sort word list, in which “alphabetical” order is determined by the order of the letters on a typewriter keyboard. The prevailing logic here is that since it’s unlikely that the typewriter keyboard configuration is going to be changed, the dictionaries may as well be made consistent and re-ordered to fit. The list starts out with q, QED, queer, queen, and query, etc. and ends with mnemonic.

Source:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/qwerty
http://inventors.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://home.earthlink.net/%7Edcrehr/whyqwert.html
http://inventors.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://kith.org/logos/words/upper/Q.html
http://patimg2.uspto.gov/.piw

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