Why is ‘qwerty’ keyboard?

Why is ‘qwerty’ keyboard?

The first six letters from the left corner of every keyboard combine to form the term ‘qwerty’. The Q-W-E-R-T-Y format of the keyboard was constructed by Christopher Latham Sholes in 1873. This format was created for a typewriter called Sholes and Glidden typewriter. This was primary typewriter made and was given away to Remington in 1873. There after this design became popular and the further improvised versions were also released as Remington 2, No. 3 and No. 389 in 1878. This ‘qwerty’ layout was followed everywhere in the electronic keyboards as a standard design. Any layout other than this was observed to be not providing significant benefits than the ‘qwerty’ design.

The use of ‘qwerty’ layout was experimented in most of the centers and in several studies. The ‘qwerty’ model was considered one among the open standards which were utilized in several locations and especially in United States. Before this ‘qwerty’ design was made, Christopher along with his friends built a writing machine. For having created the ‘qwerty’ layout in 1867, Christopher L. Sholes applied for a patent on it. Initially, the layout was looking as piano like keyboard which had 2 rows of alphabets arranged appropriately.

Sholes worked with that design for the next 6 years and tried various combinations of alphabetical arrangements on the keyboard. The keyboard that was given away to Remington as Typewriter was confirmed finally as the layout used by Remington mechanics. This Remington keyboard was rearranged further to keep ‘qwerty’ at the top left corner of the layout.

Remington later made changes to reach the current modern ‘qwerty’ layout of the keyboard. The ‘qwerty’ became famous after the delivering of Remington No.2 in 1878. This typewriter was allowing the users to utilize upper and lower case alphabets by using shift key. The modern keyboards retain the ‘qwerty’ layout with some more changes like location of M letter, locations of C and X letters and changes in locations of the punctuation marks. Any design or layout or format of the modern keyboard could have been originated from the ‘qwerty’ keyboard.