10/02/2016
See Why The Qwerty Keyboard Is Not Arranged Alphabetically
The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he developed with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé. The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as follows:
3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z 2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M
The construction of the "Type Writer" had two flaws that made the product susceptible to jams. Firstly, characters were mounted on metal arms or type bars, which would clash and jam if neighboring arms were pressed at the same time or in rapid succession. Secondly, its printing point was located beneath the paper carriage, invisible to the operator, a so-called "up-stroke" design. Consequently, jams were especially serious, because the typist could only discover the mishap by raising the carriage to inspect what had been typed. The solution was to place commonly used letter-pairs (like "th" or "st"wink so that their typebars were not neighboring, avoiding jams. [citation needed] Contrary to popular belief, the QWERTY layout was not designed to slow the typist down, but rather to speed up typing by preventing jams. Indeed, there is evidence that, aside from the issue of jamming, placing often-used keys farther apart increases typing speed, because it encourages alternation between the hands. There is another origin story in the Smithsonian that the qwerty keyboard was made for telegraph operators and has this layout to make it easy for the telegraph operator to work. (On the other hand, in the German keyboard the Z has been moved between the T and the U to help type the frequent bigraphs TZ and ZU in that language.) Almost every word in the English language contains at least one vowel letter, but on the QWERTY keyboard only the vowel letter "A" is located on the home row, which requires the typist's fingers to leave the home row for most words.
Properties
Alternating hands while typing is a desirable trait in a keyboard design. While one hand types a letter, the other hand can prepare to type the next letter, making the process faster and more efficient. However, when a string of letters is typed with the same hand, the chances of stuttering [clarification needed] are increased and a rhythm can be broken, thus decreasing speed and increasing errors and fatigue. In the QWERTY layout many more words can be spelled using only the left hand than the right hand. In fact, thousands of English words can be spelled using only the left hand, while only a couple of hundred words can be typed using only the right hand (the three most frequent letters in the English language, ETA, are all typed with the left hand). In addition, more typing strokes are done with the left hand in the QWERTY layout. This is helpful for left-handed people but to the disadvantage of right-handed people.
