In the USA in the post civil war era, standardisation became all. The new world was to be a mechanical one. A .22 bullet had to fit any .22 rifle in the world. A typist had to fit any typewriter.
There was hot competition to create a single typewriter standard.
The inventor of the Qwerty keyboard was Christopher Sholes, a Milwaukee port official, Wisconsin senator, sometime newspaper editor and a man who tried to invent not "a" typewriting machine, but "the" typewriting machine.
The challenge was mechanical; to devise a system which linked an easily understandable interface with the complicated technology of ink, typebars, levers and springs.
His first attempt was alphabetical, but the typebars clashed due to the key arrangements. So Sholes arranged them in a way to make the machine work. Frequency and combinations of letters had to be considered to prevent key clashes.
The typewriter wars heated with the appearance of typing competitions, where typists would battle it out to achieve the highest word counts.
Not surprisingly, type would clash and stick. So Sholes, it is alleged, rejigged the letters on his machine in order to keep speeds down.
In 1873, Qwerty was adopted by Remington, famous for its arms and sewing machines as well as its typewriters, and it became adopted as the basis not only for English but the majority of European languages as well.
'Creative obstruction'
But did Sholes really doctor the configuration of letters to slow the typist? Would an inventor really hobble his own brainchild?
If so, argues Fry, then the Qwerty keyboard and its inventor could be accused of "conspiracy to pervert the course of language and to limit the speed of creativity and language input, endangering billions with repetitive strain injury".
Qwerty can be seen, he argues, as "a deliberate spanner in the works of language, metaphorically and technologically".
Qwerty is "not ergonomic", agrees Professor Koichi Yasuoka of Kyoto University, a world expert on the development of the keyboard.
But he sees evidence of the practicality of Qwerty in a world of mechanical typewriters. "T and H is the most frequently used letter pair in English," he explains. "In fact in Sholes's typewriter, the typebar of T and H are located on opposite sides."
The separation of these letters was made in the interests of speed, he believes. Users could type T-H without crashing keys, whereas the proximity of E and R, he argues, is inefficient. In other words there is no evidence of deliberate slowing down.
"Ergonomics were not a characteristic of mid-19th Century design," he concludes.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10925456
