Where does the QWERTY keyboard come from?

Today, the QWERTY keyboard has become so familiar to us and popular on most technology devices from smartphones, tablets to personal computers. But how many people know where the actual origin of this keyboard comes from? Why are the letters on the keyboard not the same as the order in the alphabet?

Most of us are taught in history that the first man who invented the QWERTY keyboard is Christopher Scholes. But a recent study shows that it is not so.

According to Wikipedia, the QWERTY keyboard was invented by the first modern typewriter, Christopher Sholes, a Milwaukee editor in the 1860s.

Initially, the characters on the typewriter he invented were arranged in an alpha-concrete order, placed on the end of the metal bar to hit the paper when the key was pressed. However, when the typist learned how to type quickly, the bars connected to the letters that were close to each other on the keyboard became entangled, forcing the knocker to remove the tapping bars by hand, and often leave sign on the text.

A businessman working with Sholes, James Densmore, has suggested separating the usual character keys used to speed up typing by inventing pairs of frequently used knocks from hitting the shaft at the same time and sticking together. together.

Patent No. 207,559.The first appearance of the QWERTY keyboard

The effect of how to rearrange characters on typing speed is still a matter of controversy. Some sources incorrectly claim that the QWERTY keyboard is designed to slow down the typing speed to avoid jamming. Other sources claim that such rearrangement is effective when separating regular English strings.

History turned over

Sholes & Glidden tested typewriters around 1873

However, the Huffingtonpost news page recently quoted a story on the Smithsonian blog, which provides some evidence discovered by researchers from Kyoto, Japan that shows that, in fact, the keyboard QWERTY was not invented by Christopher Sholes first, he was only the "first to submit a patent with a typewriter with a reasonable layout of the QWERTY keyboard".

Instead, the true origin of the popular keyboard standard we use today is formed over time when telegraph operators over 150 years ago used typewriters to translate Morse code. Because this job requires that the translator have to record the translation very quickly, so the layout of the letter keys is always improved so that the key is not stuck because the typing is too fast and still achieves the required speed.

The controversy over the origin of the QWERTY keyboard to this day seems to have been elucidated. The lesson from this story about QWERTY shows how long a technology can be born, but if it is thoroughly researched and useful it will always be popular.

And more importantly, the development of QWERTY's design is not unintentional or absurd, it is complex, "evolutionary" and reasonable for Morse operators. Perhaps QWERTY has been enough and will always be used effectively. But if not, how can a new design develop?