![]() However, what the people parroting this fail to mention is that, if you go actually read the paper as we’re wont to do when researching, this paper is just speculation with no real direct evidence to back their claims up. It should be noted here that you’ll often read now-a-days that this whole jamming story is a myth, and that Sholes was simply trying to cater to telegraph operator’s usage in making the change.Įveryone claiming this, including the Smithsonian Magazine, which normally does a lot better research, cites one 2011 paper, On the Prehistory of QWERTY, by Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka of Kyoto University as their source. While you might be thinking, and it is widely claimed, this was to fix the problem via making people type slower, all evidence point to this simply being to position the arms of these letters better so they’d be less likely to cross. To solve this, the keys were rearranged to put commonly used consecutive letters further away from each other to reduce jams. This arrangement had a number of problems, but most notably as people got faster at typing, it caused the typebars of the most commonly used combination letters of the alphabet to be positioned close together, so when the keys were hit one right after the other at any fast speed, the keys would jam. ![]() The difference between this and more modern incarnations, however, is this first device more or less mimicked the layout of a piano keyboard and positioned the keys in alphabetical order in those two rows. Much like many typewriters since, Shole’s device used letters and characters on the ends of rods which were called typebars. When a key was struck, the typebar would swing up and hit the ink-coated tape which would transfer the image onto paper. There were a variety of type-writer-like devices around going back the 18th century, before one Christopher Latham Sholes, with some help from a few other guys, came up with one that would become the first commercially successful typewriter in the 1870s. ![]() The origin of the keyboard starts, unsurprisingly with the first typewriters. ![]()
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