You use the keyboard every day, whether it's a desktop computer, a laptop, a tablet, or a smartphone. But have you ever wondered why the letters on the keyboard are not in alphabetical order?
The reason dates back to the era of manual typewriters. These typewriters in earlier times had the keys arranged in alphabetical order. However, it was later discovered that people typed so quickly that the keys would jam very easily with this arrangement.
To avoid this, the keys were placed in a random order, making it difficult to type very quickly. This meant that people typed at a speed that the machine could handle. As a result, the "QWERTY" keyboard was created, which is what we use to this day.
The QWERTY keyboard layout was invented and created in the 1860s by the creator of the first modern typewriter, Christopher Sholes, a newspaper publisher who lived in Milwaukee. Initially, the characters on typewriters were arranged in alphabetical order. However, when a businessman learned to type quickly, the letters that were very close together on the keyboard got mixed up with each other, forcing the typist to separate them by hand, as well as to smudge the document he was preparing. A business associate of Sholes, James Densmore, proposed changing the position of the keys that are usually used together, to speed up typing and prevent key jamming.
There are varying opinions about this rearrangement of the letters on the keyboard. The logic behind the QWERTY layout was based on the use of English letters rather than their alphabetical arrangement. However, some sources argue that the QWERTY layout was designed to slow down typing speed to further reduce interference. On the other hand, there are sources that argue that the rearrangement was based on common sequences of letters in English. This random arrangement eventually became the standard for computers and later for devices that have been built since then.
