Why do we use qwerty

He owned the Densmore Oil Company and manufactured train cars for transporting petroleum and did not have time or resources to conduct this research.

Finally, the obvious and logical sequential alphabetical placement of the keys actually are spaced almost as well as QWERTY for key striker lock up, yet Sholes abandoned this layout as he abandoned others. Thus we are left with a conflict. Some argue the QWERTY layout was a compromise between the mechanical needs of the typewriter and the needs of the typist to have common letters under fingers.

Most certainly Sholes was mindful of the placement of the keys on his keyboard from a mechanical standpoint to minimize potential key striker lockup, but he was also looking for an edge that may very well reach beyond engineering. Sholes did not have the resources to manufacture typewriters at the scale he had hoped the market would demand as the industrial revolution was predicted to create a torrent of typewritten pages.

He needed a manufacturing partner. That partner was the E. Remington and Sons [5] that had began making guns and rifles and moved to sewing machines. Sholes stayed on with Remington for a while and met the marketing men, William O. Wykoff, Clarence W. Seamans and Henry H. They saw the problem from a perspective that no other typewriter company saw. They saw it as an education issue that could allow the company to command large shares of the market.

With the release of Remington typewriter No. As soon as Model No. Model No. The YWCA was a place where women were able to learn a new trade for the expanding office and secretarial job market. This memorization piece had an incredible effect on the typist.

It also allowed the typewriter to mechanically have a higher slope angle of Model No. Those so trained would find it almost impossible to use any other keyboard layout. They posited that it requires about hours of practice to achieve the reflexes to become a skilled typist and another to be an expert with touch typing using the home keys method, which as far as the research goes, is the fastest technique.

The plan worked so well they opened Remington Typing Schools throughout Europe a few years later. It was established quite early on, for many reason I will not cover here, that typing was primarily performed by women. Before his death, Sholes said "I do feel that I have done something for the women who have always had to work so hard.

Competitors did not understand the tactics that were at play until it was too late. The Remington course and its variants were standard High School training up until the mid s in the U. There was one more thing that Remington used as a sort of icing on the cake, so to speak. Sholes originally was going to patent the QWE. TY keyboard layout, but at the last minute he changed his mind. The demonstrations for sales of his new invention, to prove it was faster, years before formal touch typing and memorization.

It was so fast that it fascinated potential customers. I know that this information conflicts with the folktales of mechanical keys locking up because of the Bigram Frequency of key pairs.

The fact is that it was very easy to cause keys to lock up for most of the history of the typewriter up until the IBM selectric ball system. One can argue that many other keyboard and type bar layouts could actually cause less key striker lock up. We can also argue other keyboard layouts were more practical, like the sequential alphabetical or later the Dvorak layout.

Place your first fingers on those keys, and your other fingers along the same row. Keep your fingers resting lightly on the home keys. Type other letters by moving just one finger up or down and perhaps a little sideways. Learn how to do that quickly, without watching your fingers, and you can touch type! When I was a teenager, I owned a typewriter. I made a cardboard shield to stop me seeing my fingers as I typed.

I used clothes pegs to fix it to the typewriter. Then I found a touch-typing book and started to practise, making sure that I kept my fingers on the home keys and always used the correct finger to type each letter. After lots of practice, I could touch type.

I love being able to touch type. It has helped me all my life, first as a student, then in everything I have done since. Find software that you like, and put in some practice. It may seem hard at first, but persist and you will soon get good at it.

Find a friend or two and do it together. Perhaps make it a competition. Read more: Curious Kids: why do eggs have a yolk? Hello, curious kids! Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids theconversation. Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. Way before Tap, there were numerous efforts to change the arrangement and form of the keyboard—such as the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard layout, patented in by University of Washington professor August Dvorak.

More recently, there was the one-handed Twiddler keyboard. Then came mobile phones. These have led to big shifts in how we type—first T9-style typing on handset key pads, where each number represents three or four letters; then with small, BlackBerry-style keyboards; and now with touch screens.

Tap creator Dovid Schick, for example, is convinced that as computing becomes more mobile, touchable, and wearable, and as augmented and virtual reality spread, we will need new ways to input words into machines. Schick and his cofounder and wife , Sabrina Kemeny, built Tap with an accelerometer for each finger that can translate different kinds of taps into letters and punctuation.

To decide which letters should correspond to which finger combinations, they considered ergonomic studies and letter frequencies. Those who are visually disabled can use it to interact more easily with a smartphone, he says, and he can imagine it being used for languages like Chinese.

A tool called TapMapper lets users come up with their own Tap layouts. Weaver, the physical therapy professor at NYU, agrees.

And while he not surprisingly thinks the device will stick around for years to come, he does believe that other technologies, such as predictive typing software, will make it less essential. But if anything is going to convince us to replace or substantially alter the QWERTY keyboard, it will need to seriously improve how we communicate.

What about voice input? And what if the future is no input interface at all? It uses an electrode-dotted headband connected to a VR headset to track brain activity. After you select several keys, it can fill in the rest of the word, says cofounder and CEO Ramses Alcaide. Neurable is aiming for a speed of eight to 14 words per minute, Alcaide says, which he thinks will be adequate for sending a quick message.

Helpful, perhaps, but hardly the keyboard killer. One use could be to replace gaming controllers. Reardon says the CTRL-labs armband can adapt to the way users type, rather than forcing them to adapt to whatever physical or virtual keyboard they are using.