QWERTY began as one arrangement in a series of typewriter designs, not as a universal standard. Christopher Latham Sholes and his collaborators refined the layout as they developed a machine that could print letters; Remington brought their Sholes & Glidden typewriter to market in 1874. Its commercial success helped make QWERTY familiar, and that familiarity carried the layout through later typewriters, computers, and touchscreen devices. The precise reason for its final arrangement remains disputed.
Who invented QWERTY, and when?
QWERTY is associated with Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and inventor, and the collaborators who worked with him on an early typewriter. It is more accurate to describe the layout as the result of iterative development than as a design invented by one person in a single moment.
The Smithsonian places the beginnings of that work in 1866, when Sholes and others were developing a machine to number coupons and tickets. Their experiments led toward a device that could print letters. The early prototype did not have the familiar QWERTY arrangement: its letters were in a semi-sequential order, all uppercase, and the capital “I” also served as the numeral 1. Smithsonian Magazine says the collaborators settled on QWERTY after about 30 test models. That is the magazine’s account of the development, rather than a count confirmed by every source.
In 1874, E. Remington & Sons marketed the machine as the Remington No. 1. The Smithsonian identifies the Sholes & Glidden typewriter as the first commercially successful typewriter. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History says Remington put its writing machines on the market for $125; that is the historical price reported on its collection page, not a modern equivalent.
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Smithsonian Magazine’s account of QWERTY’s origins and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s Sholes & Glidden Type Writer collection page document the design’s development and commercialization.
Why are the keys in QWERTY order?
There is no uncontested explanation for the final arrangement. Historians have offered both a mechanical explanation, involving typebars that could interfere with one another, and a telegraph-related explanation, involving errors made while transcribing Morse code. These accounts should be treated as competing or potentially complementary historical arguments, not as a settled answer.
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The typebar-interference explanation
On early typewriters, pressing a key caused a metal typebar to strike the paper. Typebars could clash or jam, so their physical arrangement mattered. A 2025 working paper by David Galbraith and coauthors argues that QWERTY reflects an “infrequency principle”: where typebars had to sit next to each other, the layout placed letter pairs that occur relatively infrequently together in written English. The authors argue that this reduced opportunities for mechanical interference.
To illustrate the argument, the paper reports 146 versus 2,358 letter-pair events in the authors’ analysis of 145,000 words from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi—146 for the 1873 QWERTY analysis and 2,358 for a Dvorak arrangement. These are counts from a text-based comparison of a proposed mechanical property, not typing-speed measurements or proof that QWERTY is better for modern users. The authors present a scholarly argument in a working paper, not a final consensus on the layout’s origin. Read Galbraith and coauthors’ 2025 working paper for the argument and its analysis.
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The telegraph-transcription explanation
Smithsonian Magazine reports that some more recent historians have argued that the layout helped telegraphists avoid common errors when converting Morse code into text. This explanation focuses on the work people did with the machine and the code, rather than only on the physical placement of typebars. The Smithsonian account acknowledges that the origin is disputed; it does not establish the telegraph theory as the definitive answer.
Was QWERTY designed to make people type more slowly?
The claim that Sholes deliberately made QWERTY inefficient simply to slow typists down is too neat for the evidence presented in these historical accounts. The Lemelson-MIT page argues that commonly paired letters were split up and concludes that the layout was “actually invented to slow down typing.” A different interpretation is that separating certain letters addressed mechanical interference, while still allowing practical typing. Galbraith and coauthors’ 2025 working paper directly challenges the broad popular story, arguing that typing speed also mattered competitively.
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Reducing the chance of a typebar jam and deliberately sacrificing typing speed are not the same claim. The mechanical account may explain why some letters were placed apart without proving that the whole layout was designed to make typing inefficient. The surviving explanations do not justify presenting deliberate slowdown as settled fact. See the Lemelson-MIT biography of Christopher Sholes alongside the Smithsonian account and the 2025 paper for the difference in interpretations.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How did QWERTY become the familiar keyboard layout?
The Sholes & Glidden machine’s commercial success gave its arrangement an early advantage. As the layout spread through later typewriters, users learned it and manufacturers continued to build around it. That history helps explain persistence without requiring the claim that QWERTY is the most efficient possible arrangement.
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QWERTY continued beyond the original typebar machine, appearing on later typewriters, including IBM’s Selectric, and then on personal computers. It also appeared on keyed BlackBerry devices and on touchscreen phones and tablets. On a touchscreen, there are no typebars to jam; the inherited layout remains because people recognize it and expect to find it. The Smithsonian describes this as a pattern passed across generations of users.
Does QWERTY remain the best layout today?
The history of a layout is not a modern performance test. The typebar explanation concerns the mechanical limits of early machines, while current keyboards and touchscreens operate differently. The 146-to-2,358 comparison in the 2025 working paper counts letter-pair events in one text analysis; it does not measure how quickly or comfortably people type.
Other layouts, including Dvorak, invite comparisons involving finger travel, hand alternation, learning effort, and user experience. Those are different questions from whether a nineteenth-century layout reduced mechanical interference. The historical sources discussed here do not establish a universal modern winner. Whether switching makes sense depends on a person’s typing habits and needs, and this history alone cannot determine that choice.
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