The 0 key was added and standardized in its modern position early in the history of the typewriter, but the 1 and exclamation point were left off some typewriter keyboards into the 1970s. Typists who learned on these machines learned the habit of using the uppercase letter I (or lowercase letter L) for the digit one, and the uppercase O for the zero. 0 and 1 were omitted to simplify the design and reduce the manufacturing and maintenance costs they were chosen specifically because they were "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys. The letter M is located at the end of the third row to the right of the letter L rather than on the fourth row to the right of the N, the letters X and C are reversed, and most punctuation marks are in different positions or are missing entirely. The QWERTY layout depicted in Sholes's 1878 patent is slightly different from the modern layout, most notably in the absence of the numerals 0 and 1, with each of the remaining numerals shifted one position to the left of their modern counterparts. Differences from modern layout Substituting charactersĬhristopher Latham Sholes's 1878 QWERTY keyboard layout One popular but unverified : 162 explanation for the QWERTY arrangement is that it was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing of typebars by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther from each other inside the machine. 2 of 1878, the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters, using a shift key. The QWERTY layout became popular with the success of the Remington No. Vestiges of the original alphabetical layout remained in the " home row" sequence DFGHJKL. Apocryphal claims that this change was made to let salesmen impress customers by pecking out the brand name "TYPE WRITER QUOTE" from one keyboard row are not formally substantiated. These adjustments included placing the "R" key in the place previously allotted to the period key. The keyboard layout was finalized within a few months by Remington's mechanics and was ultimately presented: : 161–174 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,Īfter they purchased the device, Remington made several adjustments, creating a keyboard with essentially the modern QWERTY layout. In 1873 Sholes's backer, James Densmore, successfully sold the manufacturing rights for the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer to E. : 12–20 In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowel letters, A, E, I, O, U, and Y, to the upper row as follows: : 24–25 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9. In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, O to Z, right-to-left. : 170 Others suggest instead that the letter groupings evolved from telegraph operators' feedback. The study of bigram (letter-pair) frequency by educator Amos Densmore, brother of the financial backer James Densmore, is believed to have influenced the array of letters, but the contribution was later called into question. Sholes struggled for the next five years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement.
The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as shown below: - 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z In October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he developed with the assistance of his friends Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Keys are arranged on diagonal columns to give space for the levers. 7 Comparison to other keyboard input systems.