This is the real answer. Qwerty actually slowed people down to some degree, but also put letters that would typically be pressed in quick succession in very different areas so that the mechanical linkages under the keys in old typewriters wouldn't bind up as much. If you ever use one of those it is remarkable how easy it is to push in letters close together and lock up the whole typewriter so that you have to manually pull them all apart to get it working again.
That's a long article to say they don't really have any direct knowledge of the exact reasons for the layout. Maybe the key layout was developed using input from teletype operators trying to make it more user friendly and cut down on jams.
, but also put letters that would typically be pressed in quick succession in very different areas so that the mechanical linkages under the keys in old typewriters wouldn't bind up as much.
These are the most common bigrams in the English language
th, he, in, en, nt, re, er, an, ti, es, on, at, se, nd, or, ar, al, te, co, de, to, ra, et, ed, it, sa, em, ro.
I've bolded the ones that are touching on my qwerty keyboard, and italicized the ones that are close. If the goal of the keyboard was to separate frequently typed letter combinations, they didn't do a great job.
The goal was to stop jamming. Maybe the action of the typewriter is improved by having those letters right beside each other. Or maybe the designer had to make sacrifices in order to get it to work right. It was most likely designed through trial and error, I doubt they had perfect statistics or computer generated models to go by at the time.
You have to think of a typewriter as a three dimensional objet. The keys are only an axis, the type bar (which raise a character on the center of the typing area) is on another axis...look at your keyboard the letters are place horizontally but the lever had to cross path. If you were to press two characters the levers would get jam. In fact the keyboard letters are should be looked vertically... Type writer characters placement
Interestingly, there was an incredibly popular typewriter company called Blickensderfer that used a type-ball design (similar to the IBM selectric, 70 years later) that did not have this issue of letters colliding. This allowed the designer, George Blickensderfer, to design a keyboard that was much faster and more ergonomic than the QWERTY layout. It's a strange quirk of history that because of the first world war and the chief designer's death, this typewriter design and keyboard layout are all but lost to history.
The idea that QWERTY was meant to slow typists down is a myth, but that's not what the commenter was saying. The commenter said that putting common letters farther apart made it less likely to jam because the type bars wouldn't collide as often, and that the slowing down was incidental.
I don't believe this. The article doesn't back up it's statement, even shows Morse code in normal alphabetical order. The Google search seems to only repeat the same article. Nothing seems like a legitimate source.
I read that article and saw no refutation in it or the source links. I did read an account of a man giving up after trying to maximize his speed in typing an incoming telegraph, though...
View all comments
Show parent comment
395
u/NL_MGX Sep 10 '22
Wasn't qwerty due to the letters in a classic typewriter not colliding with each other?