The Design of Everyday Things

by Donald A. Norman

Christopher Latham Sholes designed the current standard keyboard in the 1870s. His typewriter design, with its weirdly organized keyboard, eventually became the Remington typewriter, the first successful typewriter: its keyboard layout was soon adopted by everyone.

Alphabetical ordering of keys seems logical and sensible: Why did it change? The reason is rooted in the early technology of keyboards. Early typewriters had long levers attached to the keys. The levers moved individual typebars to contact the typing paper, usually from behind (the letters being typed could not be seen from the front of the typewriter). These long type arms would often collide and lock together, requiring the typist to separate them manually. To avoid the

jamming, Sholes arranged the keys and the typebars so that letters that were frequently typed in sequence did not come from adjacent typebars.

The top row of the American keyboard has the keys Q W E R T Y U I O P, which gives rise to the name of this layout: QWERTY. The world has adopted the basic layout, although in Europe, for example, one can find QZERTY, AZERTY, and QWERTZ. Different languages use different alphabets, so obviously a number of keyboards had to move keys around to make room for additional characters.