In the 1860s Christopher Sholes developed the typewriter where pressing a key caused a hammer with the corresponding letter embossed to fly up and strike an inked ribbon onto the paper. Adjacent hammers tended to jam when activated too quickly. He invented the QWERTY layout so that the hammers corresponding to letters that commonly follow each other would be non-adjacent in the mechanism.
Christopher Latham Sholes was born on 14 February 1819 in Danville, Pennsylvania, USA. He apprenticed as a printer then worked in Wisconsin. He worked as a journalist and editor. Later he served as a senator for Wisconsin and as customs collector for Milwaukee.
Sholes experimented with different versions of typewriting machines. He realised that he could reduce the problem of levers hitting each other and jamming by ensuring that those letters that often followed each other were operated by levers well separated from each other.
Did You Know?
It is often said that the Qwerty layout was designed to prevent jamming by slowing down the operator. This is not true. In fact by separating letters that commonly followed one another the majority of consecutive letters are typed with alternating hands which actual helps for faster typing (even for two finger typists!).
Sholes sold his patent rights to the Remington Arms Company in 1873. That company began manufacturing the Remington typewriter Sholes continued to devise improvements for it and he added a shift key to give the option of lowercase or uppercase letters in 1878.
Sholes died on 17 February 1890.
US 79,265 “Improvement in Type-Writing Machines” 23 June 1868.
Click here to read the original patent
Did You Know?
Before Sholes rearranged the keys to cure the jamming problem, he had placed the vowels and more common consonants on the top row (AEIOPRSTUY) and the other letters alphabetically across the second row (BCDFGHJKL) and back along the third row (ZXWVQNM). The remnants of this layout can be seen in the eventual Qwerty design.
