Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - QWERTY

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

150 years ago, an American inventor by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes developed a machine to allow people to easily put text onto paper by pressing mechanical keys. He called his invention the “type writer”. After years of tinkering and adjusting, he finally came up with an arrangement of the keys that worked. The letters on the left side of the top row were Q-W-E-R-T-Y. We have basically been using the same keyboard ever since. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

150 years ago, an American inventor by the name of Christopher Latham Scholes developed a machine to allow people to easily put text on a paper by pressing mechanical keys. He called his invention the type writer. After years of tinkering and adjusting, he finally came up with an arrangement of the keys that worked. The letters on the left side of the top row were Q-W-E-R-T-Y. We have basically been using the same keyboard ever since. Learn more about the QWERTY keyboard and its many failed alternatives on this episode. of everything everywhere daily.

What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is sponsored by Skillshare. I've mentioned before about the wide variety of,

of courses which Skillshare has to offer. One of the courses that they offer is to improve your ability to type. Many people can touch type, but they might not be as fast or efficient as they could be. Skillshare has courses available to make you a better typist, or to teach you touch typing if you still have to hunt and peck on the keyboard. With Skillshare Premium, you can have unlimited access to everything for as low as 825 per month. Go to everything-dash-everywhere.com slash Skillshare to get a free two-week trial of Skillshare Premium membership, or just click on the link in the show notes.

The keyboards that most of us use is known as the Querti keyboard, based on the letters on the top left row. The Quirty keyboard was first put into popular use with the sale of the Remington No. 2 typewriter in 1878. However, the Rumington No. 2 wasn't the first typewriter. As I noted in the introduction, the modern typewriter is accredited to Christopher Latham Scholes, who was a printer and newspaper editor in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The first version of the typewriter he created didn't use.

the Quarity Layout, which we have today. His first typewriter had only two rows, and the keys were in alphabetical and numeric order. There were no keys for one or zero, because it was assumed you could use the uppercase I for one, and an O for zero. There is a legend that has floated around for years that the Quarity keyboard was developed precisely because it is inefficient. If the keyboard were to make sense, then the most commonly used letters would be on the home row where your fingers are most of the time. The six most commonly used letters in English are E, E, A-R-I-O-T. Only one of those letters, A is on the home row. The rest of them are on the top row. The legend holds that if people type too fast, it would jam the keys on the early keyboards,

so a more inefficient system was created to slow people down to ensure that the keys wouldn't jam. This is not true. Between the 1844 creation of the first typewriter and the 1878 patent filed by Scholes, which spelled out the Quarty key layout, the keyboard underwent a great number of revisions. The primary consumers of the very first typewriters were telegraph operators. They would get incoming messages over the telegraph in Morse code, and then they would have to transcribe them into plain text. The typewriter was a very easy way for them to get that done. Telegraph operators were the beta testers, if you will, of the typewriter. Koshayasuka and Matoko Yasuka of Kyoto University did a seminal research paper on the subject in

2011. They found it was feedback from telegraph operators based on their transcription of Morse code, which led to the Quarty keyboard. They noted in their paper, quote, the code representing Z, as which is often confused with the diagram S-E, more frequently used than Z. Sometimes Morse code receivers in the United States cannot determine whether Z or SE is applicable, especially in the first letter of a word before they receive the following letters. Thus, S ought to be placed nearby both Z and E on the keyboard for Morse receivers to type them quickly. By the same reason, C ought to be placed nearby I and E, but in fact, C was more often confused with S, unquote. So the letter Z, which is four dots, is very similar to the letter S, which is three dots, and E, which is one dot.

They wanted S and E to be close together. So, long story short, QWERTY keyboard, were designed for the needs of telegraph operators using Morse code. The Kyoto team concluded, quote, The speed of the Morse receiver should be equal to that of the Morse sender, of course. If Scholes really arranged the keyboard to slow down the operator, the operator became unable to catch up with the Morse sender. We don't believe that Scholes had such a nonsense intention during the development of the typewriter, unquote.

Okay, the typewriter wasn't designed to be slow on purpose, and it was designed for the benefit of Morse code operators. So, why are we still using it today? Scholes and his partner, an amateur tinker named Carlos Gilden, had difficulties manufacturing typewriters. If you've ever spent time with a manual typewriter, you know that there are a lot of moving parts, and it's actually a work of high-precision manufacturing.

In 1873, they sold the right to manufacture the typewriter to the Remington Corporation, which was a firearm manufacturer. They had expertise in the manufacturer. of precision metal parts, and they were looking to diversify after the end of the U.S. Civil War. The release of the Remington No. 2 typewriter in 1878 was the first widely manufactured typewriter on the market, and the first with a shift key for capital letters. There were over 100,000 of the Remington No. 2's manufactured.

Eventually, Remington sold their typewriter business in 1886 to the standard typewriter manufacturing company, along with the rights to use the name Remington in conjunction with typewriters. This company then merged in 1893 with the company's Smith Premier, Callagraph, Densmore, and Yost in a five-way merger to create the Union Typewriter Company. This newly formed Typewriter Trust agreed to use the Quirty keyboard for all of its typewriters. This is where the Quarity layout really became entrenched. Learning how to type isn't something that could be done overnight. Once someone had taken the time and effort to learn how to use a Quarity keyboard, they weren't likely to switch.

In 1898, the patent on the Quarity keyboard expired, and every other company which made a typewriter in the future had an incentive to use the same keyboard layout to meet the demands of the built-in audience which had already learned touch typing on this system. If you didn't use Quarity, you'd be alone in the wilderness trying to get people to adapt to your system. Fast forward through the 20th century, electric typewriters and eventually computers became popular, and they all kept using the same keyboard for data entry. We're no longer constrained by manual keys or telegraph operators. In fact, with software, we can easily change our keyboard layout with just a click of a button. So why hasn't anyone come up with anything else? Well, they have. Several times, in fact. In 1936, educational psychologist August Devorak developed the Devorak simplified keyboard layout.

The idea was pretty straightforward. Just put the most commonly used keys where your fingers are in the home row to minimize movement. Hence, all five vowels are the five leftmost characters on the middle row. In theory, the Dvorak keyboard is great. However, it never found popular use, and despite many tests, it's never been proven to be more efficient. A 1956 study by the U.S. General Services Administration found the Davorak keyboard to be no more efficient than QWERTY keyboards. Likewise, many people who have taken the time to switch have reported that there's no real efficiency benefit. Despite being available on all major computing systems, it's as a simple computer computer.

estimated that the number of Dvorak users is probably no more than 0.1% of computer users. There have been other proposed keyboard layouts and text input systems. Some can be done with one hand and some use multiple keystroke characters where your fingers never leave the keys. Despite all of the query and keyboard alternatives which have been proposed over the years, none of them have caught on. Colmack is another keyboard layout that claims to be the third most popular keyboard layout, which is a lot like saying you are the third most popular brand of Cola. The QWERTY keyboard is not universal. Other countries that use Latin characters have slightly different keyboards.

Keyboards in German countries use a Q-W-E-R-T-Z layout. Many countries use the basic QWERTY layout, but I have punctuation keys in different places and keys for special accented characters and currency simples. And in China, well, I'm going to leave that for a whole other episode. So the next time you sit down to type something, take a second to realize that the way you're inputting text was designed to help make telegraph operators transcribe Morse code easier in the 19th century. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James McLeh.

The associate producer is Thor Thompson. Today's five-star review comes from podcast Republic listener Matt. He writes, I'm so glad I found this podcast. It's interesting to learn about things I would probably never research on my own. Like why we drive on the right side of the road and others don't, or Canada's claim against Russia for space debris cleanup. Thanks a lot, Matt.

I've had many people comment that they enjoy the fact that they don't know what episode will be next. In a world where everything is fed to you based on an algorithm, based on what you've seen before, it's nice to know that there's room for serendipity and discovery.