Why the keyboard is QWERTY and not ABC

How a Milwaukee printer’s typewriter of the 1870s gave billions of people the same odd row of letters.

Learn QWERTY properly

Look at the top row of letters on your keyboard: Q W E R T Y U I O P. It's an odd order for something billions of people use every day, and the first typewriters didn't have it. Their letters ran in something close to alphabetical order. So what happened between then and now?

The short version: QWERTY was not designed to slow typists down, it was not a sales gimmick, and nobody expected it to outlive the typewriter. It came out of years of tinkering on one particular machine, and that machine happened to win.

The first keyboards looked like pianos

The story starts in Milwaukee in the 1860s. Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer and former Wisconsin state senator, was building a writing machine with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule in a local machine shop. Their patent, US 79,265, was granted on 23 June 1868. It described keys laid out like a piano's, each one lifting a type bar that struck the paper at a common printing point.

The letters on those early keyboards ran roughly in alphabetical order. That made sense to inventors who were thinking about the machine rather than the typist. It made less sense once people started using it every day.

Five years of moving keys around

Over the next few years Sholes rebuilt the machine again and again, and the keyboard changed with it. Keys moved, rows were added and letters swapped places. Researchers who have traced the changes through his letters and patents describe a layout that shifted many times before it settled.

In 1873 the machine was shown to E. Remington and Sons, the gun maker, which agreed to manufacture it. The Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer went on sale in 1874. It typed capital letters only, and its keyboard was almost the one you know: the letter row began Q W E . T Y, with a full stop where R is now. R soon moved into that spot, a change usually credited to Remington, and the top row read QWERTY.

In 1878 two more things happened. Remington's second model could type both capitals and small letters from one keyboard, using a shift mechanism. And Sholes was granted US patent 207,559, filed three years earlier, which is the earliest patent to show the full QWERTY arrangement.

Was it really about jamming?

The explanation you've probably heard is that QWERTY was designed to stop the type bars jamming. On these early machines the bars sat in a circle under the paper and swung up to strike it. Strike two neighbouring bars in quick succession and they could collide and stick, so, the story goes, Sholes spread common letter pairs apart.

There is some truth in it. Jams were a real problem, and accounts of Sholes's work describe him splitting up common pairs for exactly this reason. But it can't be the whole story. The researchers who have gone through his letters and patents find no single plan behind the layout, only a long run of changes, some made for the mechanism and some for the people using the machine. People often point out that E and R ended up side by side, though that proves less than it seems: what collided were type bars under the paper, not the keys you press.

Jamming was one pressure on the layout. It wasn't the plan behind it.

The telegraph theory

A more recent explanation comes from Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka, in a 2011 paper published by Kyoto University. They traced the keyboard through Sholes's letters and patents and argued that its early users shaped it: telegraph operators, who were among the first to use typewriters, to take down incoming Morse code.

Their best-known example is the letter Z. In the American Morse code used by US telegraphers, Z sounded almost exactly like the pair S E, so an operator who wasn't sure which one they had heard wanted Z, S and E close together. On QWERTY they still are. The paper also traces the earliest keyboard back to an older printing telegraph, and concludes that the layout changed often during development and “accidentally grew into QWERTY” under competing demands.

Not everyone is convinced, and the evidence is patchy, as it is for most theories about why a 150-year-old design looks the way it does. But it fits better than the jamming story alone: QWERTY looks like a layout adjusted again and again for a few demanding early users, then frozen.

Two myths worth dropping

“It was designed to slow typists down”

This gets repeated constantly, and there's no evidence for it. Sholes wanted a machine that could keep up with a fast operator without jamming. Typists on QWERTY machines soon got very fast indeed: in 1923 Albert Tangora typed 147 words a minute for a full hour on a manual typewriter, a record that still stands. The other records are in the fastest typists in the world.

“TYPEWRITER fits on the top row so salesmen could show off”

Every letter of TYPEWRITER really is on the top row. There's no evidence that this was planned, and the timeline doesn't help the story: on the first Sholes and Glidden machines, a full stop sat where R is now. If the trick was deliberate, it was added late. It's more likely a coincidence that someone noticed and turned into a legend.

Why QWERTY won

Rival typewriters with different keyboards appeared in the 1880s. The Caligraph, for one, had a separate key for every capital letter, so it needed no Shift at all. QWERTY beat them for reasons that had little to do with the layout itself.

Remington had the first commercially successful machine, and a head start in offices and typing schools. In 1888 a contest in Cincinnati gave QWERTY a famous win. Frank McGurrin, a court stenographer from Salt Lake City who typed by touch with all his fingers, beat Louis Traub, who used a Caligraph. The result helped make both touch typing and the Remington keyboard famous, though historians point out that one race between two typists proved more about McGurrin's method than about the layout.

Then, in 1893, five of the biggest American makers, Remington, Caligraph, Densmore, Yost and Smith Premier, joined forces as the Union Typewriter Company and adopted Remington's QWERTY as the standard. From then on, schools taught QWERTY because offices used it, offices bought it because typists knew it, and makers built it because everyone bought it. Each reason propped up the others, and they still do.

Stuck, or simply good enough?

Economists have argued about QWERTY for forty years. In 1985 Paul David used it as the classic example of path dependence: an early choice gets locked in by habit and investment, even if something better comes along later. The example caught on far beyond economics.

In 1990 Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis replied with “The Fable of the Keys”. They went back to the studies used to show that Dvorak's rival layout was better and found them weak. The most favourable, a 1944 US Navy study, had Dvorak himself involved in running it. Their conclusion was that QWERTY is about as good as the alternatives that had been tried.

The argument isn't settled, but the practical point is. No layout has been shown to be so much better that switching the whole world would pay off.

Other countries, other layouts

QWERTY isn't universal, though its shape nearly is. Keyboards in Germany, Austria and Switzerland use QWERTZ, which swaps Y and Z because Z is common in German and Y is rare. French and Belgian keyboards use AZERTY, which swaps A with Q and Z with W, and puts M on the home row. Both are clearly descendants of the original rather than fresh designs.

France has even tried to modernise its version. In 2019 its standards body, AFNOR, published a voluntary standard with two layouts: an improved AZERTY that makes French and other European characters easier to type, and BÉPO, a French layout inspired by Dvorak. Manufacturers are free to ignore it, and adoption has been slow.

On this site, the touch typing lessons follow each language's own keyboard: AZERTY for French, QWERTZ for German, and the Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish Q layouts. The fingers do the same work everywhere; only the letters change.

Why your phone uses it too

A touchscreen has no type bars, no levers and nothing to jam. Your phone uses QWERTY anyway, for the same reason your keyboard still does: you already know where the letters are. Any alternative has to beat a layout that billions of people learned first. That, more than anything Sholes decided in the 1870s, is why QWERTY is still here.

What this means for you

QWERTY isn't the most efficient layout. Going by standard English letter frequencies, only about a third of the letters you type sit on the home row, where your fingers rest, and about half are on the row above it. Layouts such as Dvorak and Colemak put around 70% on the home row instead. (These shares are worked out from Peter Norvig's letter counts of Google Books.)

But the layout is rarely what holds anyone back. Plenty of people type over 100 WPM on QWERTY, and the habits that separate them from average typists, such as not looking at the keys, staying accurate and keeping an even rhythm, work on any layout. If you're tempted to switch anyway, read QWERTY vs Dvorak vs Colemak first. It covers what the studies found and what switching really costs.

Where to start

Learn the layout in front of you properly. Start with the home row keys, keep the QWERTY finger chart open for a week, and work through the lessons, which teach two keys at a time from the home row outwards. Then take a one-minute typing test to see where you stand. A 150-year-old layout typed well beats a perfect one typed badly.

Sources

• C. L. Sholes, C. Glidden and S. W. Soule, US Patent 79,265, granted 23 June 1868.
• C. L. Sholes, US Patent 207,559, “Improvement in type-writing machines”, filed 1875, granted 27 August 1878; Hagley Museum and Library, “Hagley Vault” note on the 1878 patent.
• Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka, “On the Prehistory of QWERTY”, ZINBUN 42 (2011), 161–174, Kyoto University.
• Smithsonian Magazine, “Fact or Fiction? The Legend of the QWERTY Keyboard”.
• Wisconsin 101, “Was QWERTY designed to slow down the typist, or was it a deliberate design for telegraphers?”
• Wikipedia, “Frank Edward McGurrin”, for the 1888 Cincinnati contest.
• Paul A. David, “Clio and the Economics of QWERTY”, American Economic Review 75(2), 1985, 332–337.
• S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, “The Fable of the Keys”, Journal of Law and Economics 33(1), 1990.
• AFNOR, NF Z71-300, “User interfaces – French keyboard layouts for office”, 2019.
• Peter Norvig, “English Letter Frequency Counts: Mayzner Revisited”, 2013 (letter frequencies used for the home-row and top-row shares).