QWERTY Typewriter
The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters established the “QWERTY” layout for the letter keys. During the period in which Sholes and his colleagues were experimenting with this invention, other keyboard arrangements were apparently tried, but these are poorly documented. The QWERTY layout of keys has become the de facto standard for English-language typewriter and computer keyboards. Other languages written in the Latin alphabet sometimes use variants of the QWERTY layouts, such as the French AZERTY, the Italian QZERTY and the German QWERTZ layouts.
The QWERTY layout is not the most efficient layout possible for the English language, since it requires a touch-typist to move his or her fingers between rows to type the most common letters. Although the QWERTY keyboard was the most commonly used layout in typewriters, a better, less strenuous keyboard was being searched for throughout the late 1900s.
One popular but unverified explanation for the QWERTY arrangement is that it was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing of typebars by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther from each other inside the machine.
Another story is that the QWERTY layout allowed early typewriter salesmen to impress their customers by being able to easily type out the example word “typewriter” without having learned the full keyboard layout, because “typewriter” can be spelled purely on the top row of the keyboard. However, there is no evidence to support these claims.
