The first recorded typewriter patent was filed in 1714 by the British engineer Henry Mill, for an artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing . . . so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print. But there’s no evidence that Mill actually built his proposed machine. It was not until around 1808 that an Italian named Pellegrino Turri constructed a typewriter, which allowed a blind woman to write letters. Over the next six decades, several dozen inventors filed patents or built prototypes, but none of the machines entered mass production or attained commercial success. That had to wait until April 1874, when the American gun manufacturer E. Remington & Sons, which had already branched out into sewing machines and farm tools, shipped its first Type Writer, based on a prototype by the American inventor Christopher Sholes.
From about 1880 to 1920, an incredible diversity of competing models poured forth from numerous inventors (including Thomas Edison) and manufacturers. Some of those early machines resembled pianos, some (including Remington’s first product) looked like sewing machines, others were the recognizable ancestors of modern typewriters, and still others resembled no machine you have ever seen. Letters were variously mounted on separate type bars, on a single ball, or on a single wheel, strip, or plate. If separate type bars were used, they struck up, down, or sideways, behind or in front of the paper, which was mounted on a flat or curved carriage. What moved was the type ball carrier (as in the later ibm Selectric), the type bars (as in modern mechanical typewriters), or the machine itself. Ink was applied to a ribbon or directly to the typeface. The desired letter was chosen by striking a key or by turning a dial. Among machines that opted for striking a key, some struck one key at a time, others up to three at a time, like playing chords on a piano. The typist’s left and right hands either typed on the same keyboard or on two separate keyboards.
We now have separate numeral keys, combine uppercase and lowercase letters on the same type bar, and choose between uppercase and lowercase forms of the same letter with a shift key. But other machines added numerals to that same bar and used two shift keys (one for uppercase, another for numerals), while still others had separate uppercase, lowercase, and numeral keys. Naturally, keyboards were equally diverse-- straight, curved, or circular, with one to nine rows of keys.
QWERTY was devised by Christopher Sholes, who began his typewriter-building experiments in 1867. Sholes’s first keyboard used piano keys in a single row, with the letters in alphabetical order. But he was soon forced to change that arrangement, because his type bars responded sluggishly. When he struck one key soon after another, the second key’s type bar jammed the first bar before the first could fall back, and the first letter was printed again. Key jamming was still an occasional problem some 80 years later, when I had chicken pox, but at least by then the type bars struck the paper from the front side, so you could immediately see what was happening and separate the keys with your fingers. Alas, with Sholes’s machine and most other typewriters until the early part of the century, the type bars struck the invisible rear side of the paper, and you didn’t know the bars had jammed until you pulled out the page and saw that you had typed 26 lines of uninterrupted E’s instead of the Gettysburg Address.
To overcome the problem of invisible jamming, Sholes applied antiengineering principles with the goal of slowing down the typist and thus preventing the second bar from jamming the falling first bar. At that time, modern typing speeds were not yet a goal. The idea of eight-finger touch typing was still unknown. Typists rummaged around with one or two fingers while looking at the keyboard, and Sholes was ecstatic if the resulting typing rate reached a measly 20 or 30 words per minute, the rate of writing by hand.
Sholes began to redesign his keyboard by commissioning a study to determine the most common letters or letter combinations in English texts, then he scattered those common letters as widely as possible over the keyboard. For example, the three most common letters (E, T, O) were placed in the top row, the next two most common (A, H) in the home row, and the next most common (N) on the bottom row, causing the common digraph on to require a hurdle from top row to bottom. Remington engineers slightly modified Sholes’s almost-QWERTY design by transferring the common consonant R to the upper row, thereby enabling typewriter salesmen to show off their machine to prospective buyers by typing the word typewriter very quickly (all the letters were now in the same row). That final resulting keyboard still betrays its origin as an alphabetical arrangement of piano keys, by the nearly alphabetical sequence fghjkl in the home row, with de just to the left and I just to the right of that sequence.
The QWERTY keyboard of 1874 was eventually joined by many competing keyboards, whose manufacturers often boasted of faster or less tiring typing. For instance, the Hammond and Blickensderfer Ideal keyboard used only three rows and sensibly put the most common letters in the bottom row for easy access, in the sequence dhiatensor. Why did QWERTY nevertheless prevail, even after improvements in typewriter technology (reducing the jamming problem) and the demand for fast typing had removed the original motivation for it?
