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QWERTY forever: path dependency

Language Log 2025-04-06

The QWERTY Keyboard Will Never Die. Where Did the 150-Year-Old Design Come From? The invention’s true origin story has long been the subject of debate. Some argue it was created to prevent typewriter jams, while others insist it’s linked to the telegraph Jimmy Stamp; Updated by Ellen Wexler (Updated: February 25, 2025 | Originally Published: May 3, 2013)    includes embedded 3:35 video and several interesting historical photographs

Those who have learned to touch type most likely have wondered about the illogical, unalphabetical arrangement of the letters on the keyboard.  But we have learned to live with it, and some of us have become highly proficient at it, while others spend their whole lives hunting and pecking for the desired letters.

A few years after the iPhone’s debut, an innovative new keyboard system started making headlines. Known as KALQ, the split-screen design was created specifically for thumb-typing on smartphones and tablets. It was billed as a more efficient alternative to the ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard, named for the first six letters in the top row of keys.

How did this strange order of the letters — QWERTY — come about?

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. The team surely assumed it would be the most efficient arrangement. After all, anyone who used the keyboard would know immediately where to find each letter. Hunting would be reduced; pecking would be increased. Why change things? This is where the origin of QWERTY gets a little foggy.

One popular theory states that Sholes had to redesign the keyboard in response to the mechanical failings of early typewriters, which were slightly different from the models most often seen in thrift stores and flea markets. The type bars connecting the keys and letter plates hung beneath the paper. If a user quickly typed a succession of letters whose type bars were near each other, the delicate machinery would jam. As the story goes, Sholes redesigned the arrangement to separate the most common sequences of letters, like “th” or “he.”

In theory, then, 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.

Thus, the theory that the QWERTY system was designed to reduce mechanical error is not conclusive.

In a 2011 paper, Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka, researchers at Kyoto University, tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users. They concluded that the mechanics of the typewriter didn’t influence the keyboard design. Instead, the QWERTY system emerged in response to one group of early users: telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. These operators found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating Morse code.* The researchers write:

[American Morse] code represents Z as ‘… .’ which is often confused with the digram SE, more frequently used than Z. Sometimes Morse receivers in United States cannot determine whether Z or SE is applicable, especially in the first letter(s) of a word, before they receive following letters. Thus S ought to be placed near by both Z and E on the keyboard for Morse receivers to type them quickly.

*I feel duty bound to emphasize how important Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872) was in the history of American science and art.  Not only was he an outstanding portrait painter, he was also the co-inventor of a single-wire telegraph system and co-developer of Morse code, which I had to learn as a boy scout.

The researchers suggested that the typewriter keyboard evolved over several years as a direct result of input provided by telegraph operators. In other words, the typist came before the keyboard. They also cite the Morse history to argue against the theory that Sholes wanted to stop his machine from jamming by rearranging the keys with the specific intent to slow down typists:

The speed of Morse receiver should be equal to the Morse sender, of course. If Sholes really arranged the keyboard to slow down the operator, the operator became unable to catch up the Morse sender. We don’t believe that Sholes had such a nonsense intention during his development of [the] typewriter.

Regardless of why he developed it, Sholes himself wasn’t fully convinced that QWERTY was the best system. Although he sold his designs to Remington early on, he continued to invent improvements and alternatives to the typewriter for the rest of his life, including several keyboard layouts that he determined to be more efficient. He filed a patent application for a XPMCH keyboard in 1889, a year before he died.

U.S. Patent No. 568,630, issued to C.L. Sholes after his death

Sholes filed this patent in 1889, a year before his death. Google Patents

VHM:  Note that all the vowels are in the middle row and easily accessible to the right hand.  And look where Q and Z are.  I think that Sholes was on to something.

But the biggest rival to challenge QWERTY was the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, developed by August Dvorak in the 1930s. The Dvorak increased the number of words that can be typed using the “home” row of keys where your fingers naturally rest. These are the letters you most often type when you’re hitting keys at random: asjdfkal. sdfjkl. asdfjklasdfjk. Some research showed that Dvorak users reported improved speed and accuracy—though much of that testing was funded by Dvorak—and other research has since suggested that Dvorak isn’t more efficient. But efficiency hardly matters, as it was already too late for a new system to gain a foothold by the 1930s. While Dvorak certainly had its champions, it never gained enough of a following to overthrow King QWERTY.

When the first generation of computer keyboards emerged, there was no longer any mechanical reason to use the system—computers didn’t get jammed. But, of course, there was the minor fact that millions of people had already learned to type on QWERTY keyboards. It had become truly ubiquitous in countries that used the Latin alphabet.

When a design depends on a previous innovation too entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist to change, it’s known as a path dependency. This is also why the KALQ proposal is so interesting. It attempts to break from the tyranny of Sholes, whose QWERTY system makes even less sense on the virtual keyboards of tablets and smartphones than it does on computer keyboards.

Is the KALQ system any different? In some ways, the answer is obviously yes. It was designed around a very specific, very modern behavior—typing with thumbs. Like the 19th-century telegraph operators, the users determined the structure of the KALQ keyboard. But it could still be argued that the KALQ system, or any similar system that may be developed in the future, is also a product of path dependency. Because no matter how the letters are arranged, the basic notion of individually separated letters distributed across a grid dates back to Sholes and his colleagues in Milwaukee. If you gave an iPad to someone who had never used a keyboard and told them to develop a writing system, chances are they would eventually invent something more intuitive. Perhaps a gesture-based system that borrows from shorthand? Or some sort of swipe-to-type interface?

Of all the miraculous things about typing with the Latin alphabet, here are two that boggle my mind:

1. people can type rapidly on those little glass plates with just two thumbs, even those with fat, pudgy fingers

2. people like my son can seemingly effortlessly and nonchalantly swype type, their finger gliding over the surface of that little glass plate.

In response to those feats, I introduce a Mandarin complement that I will use in a forthcoming post about Mandarin disyllabism:  bùdéliǎo 不得了 ("awesome")

 

Selected readings

[Thanks to John Rohsenow]