Have you ever wondered why “QWERTY” is the worldwide keyboard design for English language writing machines? I know I have. And have you ever wondered what the heck this “QWERTY” thing is, and why it is hardly ever discussed except by Saturday morning newspaper columnists with nothing better to rabble on about? If you have, you are a rare and interesting person.
I just typed QWERTY by hitting the first six letter keys on my computer keyboard, left to right. And the rest of the standard keyboard arrangement is built around these letters. It is the accepted pattern on your computers, SmartPhones, dumb phones and anything with a keyboard made to type words and stuff. Hence, the term “Qwerty Keyboard”.
Youngsters of the computer/cell phone age probably don’t know (and certainly don’t care) that the Tweets and texts they are typing several hundred times a day by the lightning fast pricking of their thumbs originated over 150 years ago with the invention of an obsolete museum piece called the “typewriter”. (And they probably don’t care that “the pricking of their thumbs” is a reference to another nearly obsolete item, namely a “book”. By an obsolete guy called “Shakespeare”.)
But why QWERTY, other than it’s fun to say?
My exhaustive 3.5 minutes of research reveals that when the first commercial typewriters were being invented around 1874, there was a problem. No one had invented paper yet, and it was difficult to get those stone tablets into the cylindrical thingy on the typewriter.
Just kidding, of course, paper was invented a lot earlier — say, about 1860.
Be that as it may, the problem with the original alphabetical order of keys was the metal arm thingies attached to the keys kept jamming when neighboring keys were pressed, so a smart dude named Mr. Sholes “struggled for five years” to come up with an a design that would avoid jamming. Also, QWERTY is apparently blamed on the influence of telegraph operators who were used to Morse Code, which I personally understand about as much as I understand the meaning of life, and the secrets of the universe.
All of which is currently ironic because keys don’t jam on digital keyboards, but we’re all still stuck with QWERTY. And, hey, when something is all you know, then you know it all. Teenagers with the blazing thumbs can set speed records on their iPhones, and as they say, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Maybe that’s why social media is so evil these days.
I first encountered QWERTY and the ancient typewriting machine in high school. Yes, at the great risk of looking like a dork, I took typing class. I took it for two reasons: 1. all the girls were in typing class, and 2. it was rumored to be “easy credits”. It turned out that both of those notions were gross exaggerations. There were way too many other male people in the class, and slamming away with skinny fingers on those clunky Remingtons was far from “easy”.
But the thing is, knowing how to type turned out to be one of the few good things I got out of high school. (The other was learning how to grow long hair.)
I’m thinking about all this because the Better Half got me a wonderful present recently. It’s a 1940s Smith Corona typewriter that she found in a second hand store. It’s the coolest thing ever but even though it still works, it’s almost impossible to type a whole sentence without breaking a finger or two.
But guess what the easiest thing to type on it is without jamming the keys…
QWERTY qwerty QWERTY. That never gets old.
Harley Hay is a Red Deer writer and filmmaker.