QWERTY, DVORAK, KALQ, OR? PART 1

SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE RECENTLY POSITED, “The QWERTY Keyboard Will Never Die. Where Did the 150-Year-Old Design Come From?” In February 25, 2025, Ellen Wexler updated a Smithsonian article by Jimmy Stamp from May 3, 2013. 

Here, in Parts 1 and 2 today and tomorrow, are tidbits gleaned from the more recent article. See also “Tripping Through Keyboards” and “Holmes and Our Star Quarterback” at SimanaitisSays. 

A typewriter advertisement contemporary to Holmes’ times. Its price was equivalent to around $400 today. Image from The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, Vol. 1.

QWERTY. Named, of course, for the first six of top-row letters, this keyboard wasn’t on the earliest of mechanical machines. Wexler recounts, “In the 1860s, a politician, printer, newspaper man and amateur inventor in Milwaukee by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes spent his free time developing various machines to make his businesses more efficient. One such invention was an early typewriter, which he and several of his colleagues patented in 1868. Their keyboard resembled a piano and was built with an alphabetical arrangement of about two dozen keys.” 

Anyone knowing the alphabet would know where to expect each letter. Why anything more complicated? 

“This,” Wexler says, “is where the origin of QWERTY gets a little foggy.” 

The 1873 prototype used to demonstrate the technology to Remington. This and the following image from Smithsonian Magazine. 

The Anti-Jam Theory. Early mechanisms were apparently susceptible to jamming, and having common pairs of letters, like “th” or “he,” only heightened the jamming. 

So why not relocate these commonly paired letters apart from each other?  

“In theory, then,” Wexler notes, “the QWERTY system should maximize the separation of many common letter pairings. However, the ‘e’ and ‘r’ keys are right next to each other, even though ‘er’ is the fourth most common letter pairing in the English language. One of Sholes’ early prototypes addressed this problem—the ‘r’ key is swapped with the period key—though that design appears to have been scrapped. If it had been put into production, this article would have been about the QWE.TY keyboard.”

Another keyboard variation from an 1889 patent by Sholes.

A Done-Deal, For a Time. “By 1891,” Wexler writes, “Remington claimed that more than 100,000 of its QWERTY-based typewriters were in use across the country. The fate of the keyboard was decided in 1893 when several of the largest typewriter manufacturers—including Remington—merged to form the Union Typewriter Company, which adopted QWERTY as the de facto standard that we know and love today.”

It has become ubiquitous to the point of a cultural identifier: In an episode of a favorite sleuth, Nero Wolfe, his assistant Archie exposes a faux reporter when she fails to identify the meaning of “QWERTY.”

Tomorrow in Part 2, Ellen Wexler offers a non-jamming theory of QWERTY. And have you heard of Dvorak Simplified Keyboard? Or KALQ?

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025