We use keyboard every day, be it our desktop, or laptop, or
tablet or smartphone. But have you ever wondered as to why the keyboard is not
arranged in alphabetical order?
The reason goes
back to the time of manual typewriters. These typewriters in earlier days did
have the keys arranged in alphabetical order. However, it was later discovered
that the people typed so fast that the mechanical character keys got jammed
very easily with this arrangement.
To prevent this,
the keys were randomly positioned so that the weaker fingers were needed more
frequently. This meant that people typed at a speed which the machine could
handle. As a result, the ‘QWERTY’ keyboard came into existence that we find and
use today.
The QWERTY keyboard
layout was devised and created in the 1860s by the creator of the first modern
typewriter, Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor who lived in Milwaukee.
Originally, the characters on the typewriters he invented were arranged
alphabetically, set on the end of a metal bar which struck the paper when its
key was pressed. However, once an operator had learned to type at speed, the
bars attached to letters that lay close together on the keyboard became entangled
with one another, compelling the typist to manually unstick the typebars, and
also regularly blotting the document. A business associate of Sholes, James
Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to
speed up typing by preventing common pairs of typebars from striking the platen
at the same time and sticking together.
There are varied
opinions on this rearrangement of letters in the keyboard. The logic of the
QWERTY layout was based on letter usage in English rather than positioning of
letter in the alphabet. However, some sources assert that the QWERTY layout was
designed to slow down typing speed to further reduce jamming. Also, the QWERTY
keyboards were made so one could type using keys from the top row of the keyboard.
On the other hand, there are sources who assert the rearrangement worked by
separating common sequences of letters in English. Apparently, the hammers that
were likely to be used in quick succession were less likely to hinder with each
other. This random arrangement eventually became standard in computers later
followed by the devices made after that.