The History of the QWERTY Keyboard

Christopher Latham Sholes, a Milwaukee newspaper editor and amateur inventor, patented the first practical typewriter in 1868 along with his colleagues Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden. The machine was crude by modern standards — it could not even show what it had typed until the paper was removed from the carriage.

The earliest layout placed the keys in alphabetical order, arranged in two rows. It seemed logical at the time.

Sholes quickly discovered a critical flaw. When two adjacent type bars were pressed in rapid succession, they would jam together. The solution was counterintuitive: separate the most commonly used letter pairs so their type bars would be far apart mechanically, reducing jams.

Through years of trial, error, and collaboration with educator Amos Densmore and telegraph operators who provided data on the most common English letter sequences, Sholes arrived at the QWERTY layout by 1873.

In 1873, Sholes sold his patent to E. Remington and Sons, the arms manufacturer that had diversified into sewing machines after the Civil War. Remington refined the design and launched the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer in 1874.

Sales were slow at first. Mark Twain famously purchased one of the early machines and typed what he claimed was the first typewritten book manuscript — The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. By the 1880s, the typewriter was indispensable in American offices.

The mechanical justification for QWERTY vanished the moment electric typewriters arrived in the mid-20th century. By then, however, millions of typists had trained on QWERTY. Retraining them on a more efficient layout would cost more than the efficiency gains were worth.

The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, patented in 1936 by Dr. August Dvorak, placed the most common English letters on the home row and promised significant speed improvements. Despite decades of advocacy, it never displaced QWERTY.

Today, QWERTY is so deeply embedded in global infrastructure — from physical keyboards to touch screens to muscle memory — that replacing it would require a coordinated effort of extraordinary scale.

While QWERTY is dominant in English-speaking countries, other languages developed their own regional variants. France uses AZERTY. Germany and central Europe use QWERTZ. Many countries overlay their native characters on a QWERTY base using modifier keys or alternate input methods.

The international reach of QWERTY reflects the global spread of English in business and technology during the 20th century.