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Why Do Keyboard Letters Start With QWERTY?
There’s a reason ABCDEF never happened
It’s something you do without a thought every day. Every time you send an email, search, enter a password, or send a late-night message, you start with the same six letters on the keyboard: Q, W, E, R, T, Y.
But oddly enough, that arrangement doesn’t make much sense.
The letters aren’t in alphabetical order. They are not positioned in such a way as to make typing more efficient. By today’s standards, in fact, it is not even very efficient. But for some reason, even though there have been alternatives available for many years, almost every computer, laptop, and smartphone keyboard in the world uses the same pattern!
So why?
To solve that, one must look back almost 160 years to a time before digital typing, the power of electricity, and an annoying mechanical issue that altered the way billions of people interact with technology forever.
The tale starts with an 1860s American inventor, Christopher Latham Sholes. Sholes was developing a machine that was able to write words mechanically on paper, something revolutionary for the time. Together with his partners, he created one of the first commercially viable typewriters, which would go on to change the way people communicate.
