Here's what the Boston Globe says about the typewriter keys....
DR. KNOWLEDGE
Why is a typewriter laid out with keys the way it is?
January 2, 2006
Q: I would like to know why a typewriter is laid out with keys the way it is. The locations of the keys seem really awkward, and I have a friend who says they're like that on purpose to be a pain to use. Can this really be true? Also, in other countries, what do typewriters look like?
P.D., Boston
A: Early typewriters were arranged in rows of keys laid out in alphabetical order with separate keys for upper- and lowercase (the shift key took a while to be invented).
An American inventor by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes made the first commercial typewriter in 1873 and found that fast typists could jam the keys if they typed quickly enough. (This all seems so ancient now, but typewriters used to have a mechanical hammer that pushed a thin rod with a raised metal letter on it against an inked ribbon to print the letter onto paper).
Sholes decided it would make sense to put the letters that are often next to each other in sentences on opposite ends of the keyboard, so that's the first thing that broke with an alphabetical layout and gave us the ''QWERTY" keyboard so familiar today.
Touch typing was originally thought to be nearly impossible, and everyone ''pecked" the letters out, so this seemed a good and simple solution. In a sense, you're right: It's designed to be inconvenient.
Apparently Sholes pushed for his layout on the basis of it needing less hand movement. An added bonus to the layout is that salesmen could pick out the keys to spell the word ''typewriter" with the keys from just one row and look as if they were better typists than they might be in reality.
Various other keyboard designs have been tried from time to time but have had limited success. One called the Dvorak keyboard is supposed to be easier to use, but once you've learned to use a conventional keyboard, it's really hard to switch.
This brings us to other countries, and by and large the layouts are similar except with some small variations to support extra characters such as ones that look like ours but have accents or tildes. One particularly frustrating quirk is that many European non-English-language keyboards are almost identical but swap the Y and Z keys.
Dr. Knowledge answers your questions about science each week. E-mail questions to drknowledge@globe.com or write Dr. Knowledge, c/o The Boston Globe, PO Box 55819, Boston, MA 02205-5819. Include your initials and hometown. |
