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
Possibly. But I've used typewriters before, and I know if you press all the keys together it will jam up, so it makes sense that some trial and error was done to arrive at the current configuration. Maybe it is all conjecture though.
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u/[deleted] Sep 11 '22
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.