who idea and why?

Question

Why wasnt the keyboard made with the letters in alphabetical order?

Answer 1

It was the work of inventor C. L. Sholes, who put together the prototypes of the first commercial typewriter in a Milwaukee machine shop back in the 1860's.
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For years, popular writers have accused Sholes of deliberately arranging his keyboard to slow down fast typists who would otherwise jam up his sluggish machine. In fact, his motives were just the opposite.
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When Sholes built his first model in 1868, the keys were arranged alphabetically in two rows. At the time, Milwaukee was a backwoods town. The crude machine shop tools available there could hardly produce a finely-honed instrument that worked with precision. Yes, the first typewriter was sluggish. Yes, it did clash and jam when someone tried to type with it. But Sholes was able to figure out a way around the problem simply by rearranging the letters. Looking inside his early machine, we can see how he did it.
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The first typewriter had its letters on the end of rods called "typebars." The typebars hung in a circle. The roller which held the paper sat over this circle, and when a key was pressed, a typebar would swing up to hit the paper from underneath. If two typebars were near each other in the circle, they would tend to clash into each other when typed in succession. So, Sholes figured he had to take the most common letter pairs such as "TH" and make sure their typebars hung at safe distances.
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He did this using a study of letter-pair frequency prepared by educator Amos Densmore, brother of James Densmore, who was Sholes' chief financial backer. The QWERTY keyboard itself was determined by the existing mechanical linkages of the typebars inside the machine to the keys on the outside. Sholes' solution did not eliminate the problem completely, but it was greatly reduced.
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The keyboard arrangement was considered important enough to be included on Sholes' patent granted in 1878 (see drawing), some years after the machine was into production. QWERTY's effect, by reducing those annoying clashes, was to speed up typing rather than slow it down.



http://home.earthlink.net/~dcrehr/whyqwert.html

Answer 2

The keyboard we have is called the "qwerty" keyboard. The very first typewriters did have the keys arranged alphabetically. Because of the design, the keys locked and jammed in typing because of order of the keys - alphabetical. So the inventor figured out a way around the problem by rearranging the letters. And that is why we have the QWERTY keyboard to this day. We no longer need that arrangement, but we are all so used to it that it isn't likely to change anytime soon!!

Answer 3

The first practical typewriter was invented by Christopher Latham Sholes, and was marketed by the Remington Arms company in 1873. The action of the type bars in the early typewriters was very sluggish, and tended to jam frequently. To fix this problem, Sholes obtained a list of the most common letters used in English, and rearranged his keyboard from an alphabetic arrangement to one in which the most common pairs of letters were spread fairly far apart on the keyboard. Because typists at that time used the "hunt-and-peck" method, Sholes's arrangement increased the time it took for the typists to hit the keys for common two-letter combinations enough to ensure that each type bar had time to fall back sufficiently far to be out of the way before the next one came up. Note that Sholes hadn't imagined that typing would ever be faster than handwriting, which is usually around 20 words per minute (WPM) or less.

Around 1878, ten-finger typing, promoted by Mrs. L. V. Longley, the head of a Cincinnati school for stenographers, started to replace two-finger typing. Later, Frank E. McGurrin, a federal court clerk in Salt Lake City, taught himself to touch-type without looking at the keys. When McGurrin won a highly publicized typing contest between himself and Louis Taub of Cincinnati (both of whom claimed to be the "world's fastest typist"), touch-typing began to catch on.

Although typists' speeds quickly surpassed the one- and two-finger speeds achieved by early typists on the original alphabetic keyboards, the actions on the newer typewriters kept improving to keep up, and the jamming problem did not recur. Sholes himself was granted a patent on an improved keyboard arrangement in 1896. However, then as now there was widespread belief in the myth that the benefits of retraining typists were not worth the costs, and to this day the qwerty keyboard layout has remained the industry standard.

Answer 4

the letters you use more are placed in convenient spots so you can easily type them. this is why letters like Q and Z are in the corners