Who came out with the...........?

Question

design for the place ment of the key's on a keyboard and why in that order?

Answer 1

Christopher Latham Sholes co-invented the typewriter with Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden. Sholes received a patent for the typewriter in 1868, based on a model made from wood and eleven piano keys. He sold the rights to the Remington Arms Company for $12,000 in 1873. The first typewriter sold by Remington had all the features developed by Sholes. At that point, it was limited to capital letters and the typist was not able to see the line being typed.

The enduring innovation by Shole's, however, was the keyboard layout. With the letters in alphabetical order, he found the levers tended to strike each other and jam the machine. He rearranged the letters until he was satisfied with the mechanical performance. The resultant placement, including QWERTY, remains as the standard layout for American English keyboards today. The keyboard was named QWERTY which was derived from the first five letters on the typewriter keyboard.

Now, 128 years after striking his first typewriter key, Sholes will receive recognition by being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame during a formal ceremony in September. His achievement will be honored in a permanent exhibit, along with 158 previous and nine new inductees, at the Hall's museum in Akron, OH. The current museum facility opened in 1995 and has hosted more than 700,000 visitors.

Answer 2

I'll be interested to hear the real answer, but obviously some thought went into it. Someone probably did a study of lots of writing, then realized they had 8 fingers to work with for the most part, etc. That's why the alphabet wound up on 3 lines, the odd characters like z, q, etc. are relegated to the pinky, the numbers and less common punctuation require a leap up two rows....

It seems well designed, but I guess it could have been better...

Answer 3

I assume you are asking about the QWERTY keybaord. It is the one with qwerty as the first 6 letters on it.

The QWERTY design was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873, when it first appeared in typewriters. He made it that way because the idea was to alternate between hands, so the typewriter's striking letters would not get caught. And the design just stuck after then.

Answer 4

I don't know who came out with it, but I know as typewriters became more commonplace, people began to become better typers. Back then, the key layout was alphabetical. However, people got so used to it that they began typing faster than the typewriter coudl "stamp" the letter (they would hit two letters almost simultanously). This caused serious problems, so someone came out with a new key layout (called QWERTY) to preevent people from typing too fast for the typewriter. Now, with the advent of computers, they have left it the same since computers can handle rapid typing.