QWERTY Was Not Built to Slow You Down. The Paper Trail Leads to Morse Code and a Patent Dodge.
The jamming story is printed on museum object records and repeated in textbooks. A Kyoto University study of the surviving prototypes found something duller and stranger - telegraph operators, a factory compromise, and a rearrangement made to get around somebody else's patent.
In short
What happened. The common explanation for the QWERTY keyboard - that it was arranged to stop type-bars clashing, or to slow typists down - is not supported by the surviving record. A study in the Kyoto University journal ZINBUN traced the layout through the machines themselves.
What it means. The arrangement came from the first paying customers, who were telegraph operators writing down Morse by ear, and then from three rounds of commercial tinkering. The final version dates from 1882 and was made to get around a patent.
Risks and impact. Nothing practical is at stake. What is at stake is a habit of mind: the assumption that a thing everyone uses was designed by someone who meant it.
What can be done. Look up Sholes’ 1878 patent. The layout appears only in the drawings, never in the argument.
What to watch. Whether museum object records and textbooks catch up with the paper trail.
Shown as a summary because of your reading settings.
What happened
A workshop in Milwaukee, some time in the late 1860s. On the bench sits a wooden box fitted with a row of ebony and ivory keys taken straight off a piano. Press one and a thin metal arm swings up from underneath and slaps a letter against the bottom of a rubber roller. Nobody can see the line being written. To read it, you lift the carriage and look.
📖 What the sources say. The patent granted to C. Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule on 23 June 1868, number 79,265, tells the reader to “put a key-board similar to the keyboard of a piano, having as many keys L, plus one, as types to be used”. It never says which letter goes where.
🏺 What the evidence supports. That first board carried 28 keys in alphabetical order - A to N running left to right, then O to Z running back the other way.
🎬 Reconstruction (we are imagining). The bench, the light, the sound of the thing. The machine is documented. The workshop scene is not.
Ask why the letters sit where they do and you will usually get one of two answers: the layout stops the type-bars clashing, or - the stronger version - it was built to slow typists down so the machine could keep up. Both are repeated by careful institutions. The Smithsonian’s object record for the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer states that the designers “adopted the layout to prevent the mechanical type bars, arranged in a circle inside the machine, from clashing in operation”. Its record for the Remington Standard No. 2 says the design “was primarily to prevent the type bars from jamming”.
Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka of Kyoto University went looking for the paper trail behind that. On the slowing-down version their verdict runs to two words: “It’s nonsense.”
Their reason is commercial rather than mechanical. The first customer for the Type-Writer was Edward Payson Porter, principal of Porter’s Telegraph College in Chicago. “Early customers of Type-Writer were Morse receivers,” the paper says, and a telegraph operator taking down an incoming message has to keep pace with the person sending it. A keyboard built to slow the operator down would have been unsellable to the only people buying.
What the evidence supports
Three different kinds of claim are tangled together here, and they are worth pulling apart.
The dates and the machines are documented. The 1868 board was alphabetical. By April 1870 it had 38 keys, “nearly in alphabetical order, but U was next to O”. By July 1872 there were 42. In February 1873 the machine’s promoters, Densmore and Yost, took it to E. Remington & Sons, and a manufacturing contract was signed on 1 March. That autumn two men at Remington, Jenne and Clough, finished a working model and moved R up next to E, into the slot the full stop had been using. Remington released the Type-Writer No. 2 in January 1878. On 1 August 1882 the selling rights passed to a new firm, Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict, which “slightly changed the design of No. 2 including the keyboard arrangement, where M was moved next to N, and C was exchanged with X” - and did so, the paper says, “to evade the patents that were assigned to the Type Writer Company”. That last edit is the one that produced the board under your hands.
The Morse explanation is an inference, and the authors present it as one. Their example is the American Morse code for Z, four dots, which an operator could easily hear as the pair S-E. So S wanted to be within reach of both Z and E. The layout still has that shape: on the keyboard in front of you, Z sits one step down and to the left of S, and E one step up and to the right.
And one thing is simply missing. No statement from Sholes explaining the arrangement has survived. His own patent, 207,559, filed on 8 March 1875 and granted on 27 August 1878, is a list of mechanical improvements - carriage, platen, ratchet, inking ribbon. The layout is visible in the drawings. The reasoning is nowhere.
The background
The jamming story is not stupid, which is exactly why it lasted. Early machines were up-strikers: the bars swung up from a circular basket underneath and struck the paper out of sight. They could and did collide. Attach a real mechanism to a guess and the guess starts to feel like a finding.
The second half of the folklore is the useful one to check, because it is the half that costs people money. If QWERTY is an accident, the argument runs, then some better layout is being kept from us - usually the one patented by August Dvorak.
Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis went through the evidence for that in the Journal of Law and Economics in 1990. The famous result is a wartime US Navy study from 1944: fourteen typists retrained on freshly overhauled Dvorak keyboards, four hours a day, who after an average of 83 hours went from about 32 words a minute to 56. Liebowitz and Margolis had to track down a copy through Dvorak International to read it. They note that Earle Strong, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, reported the Navy experiments were conducted by Dvorak himself, who held the patent and had a financial interest in the outcome, and that the two groups were not measured the same way.
Strong ran his own trial for the General Services Administration in 1956. Ten government typists were retrained on Dvorak; it took well over 25 hours of four-hour days for them merely to get back to the speed they already had. A second group of ten then trained on the keyboards they already used. The Dvorak typists “improved less quickly with further Dvorak training than did Qwerty typists training on Qwerty keyboards”. Liebowitz and Margolis conclude that “there is no scientifically acceptable evidence that Dvorak offers any real advantage over Qwerty”.
So the folklore has two halves and both are thin. The layout was not designed to hold you back, and there is no demonstrated alternative that would let you go faster.
Who it touches
Four sets of hands shaped this thing and only one of them is remembered. Sholes, of Milwaukee, is named on both patents; he kept redrawing the board for years and left no surviving explanation of any of it. Porter, the telegraph school principal, wanted numerals on the machine so that operators could write down Morse messages containing figures - the first user requirement in the whole story, and it came out of a telegraph office. Jenne and Clough were finishing somebody else’s prototype for a factory, and they are the reason R sits where the full stop used to be.
The last link in the chain has no name attached to it at all. In 1882 somebody at Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict, working on a sales problem rather than a typing problem, shifted M down beside N and swapped C with X so that the machine would sit outside another company’s patent claims. A century and a half later that edit is still in force, on every keyboard and every phone screen, and nobody wrote down who made it.
The deeper story
There is a particular disappointment in learning that a thing you use every day was not designed so much as left over.
We prefer origin stories with someone in charge. An intention, even a slightly perverse one, makes an object legible: somebody sat down, weighed the problem and chose. “It was arranged this way to stop the bars clashing” is a story of that kind, and it is emotionally cheaper than the alternative, which is that the arrangement is sediment - a telegraph habit, a factory fix, a patent workaround, each laid down by someone solving a problem that has since vanished.
It is worth separating two things that get muddled here. Arbitrary is not the same as bad. The value of a standard mostly is not that it is the best possible arrangement; it is that everyone else is using it too. Millions of people can sit down at an unfamiliar machine and type. That is a real good, and it is produced by agreement rather than by optimisation. The Kyoto study takes the intention out of QWERTY. It does not take the usefulness out.
What it does take away is the comfort of assuming that the built world was reasoned into place. Some of it was. A great deal of it is the residue of decisions made quickly, for reasons nobody wrote down, by people who had no idea they were setting anything.
And there is a limit to what even the paper trail can settle. We know what changed, and roughly when, and in a few cases who profited. We do not know what Sholes was thinking. That part burned off long ago, and the honest position is to say so rather than to fill the gap with a better story.
Something to sit with
Which of the arrangements you live inside - a layout, a schedule, a form you fill in - do you assume somebody chose on purpose?
If it turned out nobody had, would that change how easily you could imagine it being different?
Sources
- Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka - On the Prehistory of QWERTY, ZINBUN no. 42 (2009/2010), pages 161 to 174, Kyoto University Research Information Repository — https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/server/api/core/bitstreams/d...
- United States Patent 79,265 - C. Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule, Improvement in Type-Writing Machines — https://patents.google.com/patent/US79265A/en
- United States Patent 207,559 - C. Latham Sholes, Improvement in Type-Writing Machines, filed 8 March 1875 — https://patents.google.com/patent/US207559A/en
- Stan J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis - The Fable of the Keys, Journal of Law and Economics, volume 33, number 1, pages 1 to 25 — https://ios23.classes.ryansafner.com/files/readings/Leibowitz-Margo...
- Smithsonian National Museum of American History - object record, Sholes & Glidden Type Writer — https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_850542
- Smithsonian National Museum of American History - object record, Remington Standard No. 2 Typewriter — https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object/nmah_687313
We report facts from the sources above in our own words and link to the originals. Interpretation is ours, not theirs.
♻︎ Free to republish
Copy this HTML into your CMS. Credit line and licence are included. Republish our work — free
Every headline has a deeper story. This is ours.
What we are doing here