From Caesar to Sholes

Every typing student has asked, "Why do my arms ache? Why is typing class so slow? Why do I make mistakes? Why is the keyboard layout like this? Why doesn't it follow the alphabetical order?" Here is the story. The alphabetical order was established by Julius Caesar in the first century B.C. for military and political uses. With a fixed order for letters, Caesar could send coded messages to his commanders or to Rome, with little fear of discovery if his messengers were captured. For each letter, his code substituted the third letter over from that letter. For example, he had a D for an A, an E for a B, and F for a C, and so forth. This order of substitutions had nothing to do with the frequency of letters in Latin, much less in English, which was not invented yet.

With the invention of movable type, Europe had an information explosion. The printer Gutenberg, in the fifteenth century, invented the printing press and sold Bibles for a fraction of the price of hand copying. He also became aware of letter-frequency, as he used many more letter Es in German, than any other letter. By the Eighteenth century, when the newspaper was invented, editors were well aware of letter-frequency, because type trays had big squares for the most used letters, and small squares for the seldom used letters.

During this time, events started moving toward other methods of printing. It is reputed that in 1711 James Ranson made the first printing machine with rods, strings and an inked ribbon. (Century of the Typewriter, by Wilfred A. Beeching, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1974, pp. 14 to 47) In 1829, William Burt patented a 'typographer' that used ink pads; but he did not continue development of the machine.

The Italians, famous for electrical discoveries and music, also pursued typing. Giuseppe Ravizza, of Novara, designed a type machine, but it drew little attention. By 1858, at an Exhibition in Jurda, he won a silver medal for the 'Cembalo Scrivano' - a writing harpsichord. In 1867, Ravizza added a bell at the end of the line of type which would signal the typist to change lines before continuing typing. An early sound card! Ravizza also made the first practical use of a moving inked ribbon, instead of using carbon paper, a feature still used today in dot matrix, daisy wheel, ball, and hammer printers. Ravizza was not satisfied with his designs, and his machines did not go into production. By 1883, he applied for a patent for the "visible writer", but he had been beaten by the Remington Model 2.

After the American civil war, Christopher Lathom Sholes, a Wisconsin typesetter, and Carlos Glidden invented the first commercially produced typewriter, with three rows of capital letters and numbers. The first model, displayed in 1867, was named "type-writer." James Densmore, a newspaperman, caught Sholes' vision, and became their financial backer; he invested $600, for a 25% share ($600 was more than several years wages at that time).

Sholes offered Western Union the type-writer patent for $50,000, but Western Union turned it down, perhaps because the machine still had limitations (the keys would jam, the ribbon was messy, and the movable bar would fall off). In improving his design, Sholes considered how the keyboard should be organized. Ravizza's design had followed the piano keyboard. Instead of following that strategy, Sholes started to arrange the keys alphabetically, using a three and four row keyboard arrangement. In trying to solve the key jamming problem of the keyboard layout, he used the suggestion of his brother-in-law to move the most frequently used keys (E, T, R, I, O, and N) away from the home row. That change increased the amount that the fingers would flex and extend, and it increased the amount the fingers would have to travel to perform their work. This would, in turn, greatly slow the typists' fingers and thus reduce the key jamming problem. The QWERTY keyboard was born! This keyboard layout is called QWERTY, because that is the word spelled by the first six letters on the third or upper letter row.

In 1873, the Remington Company bought Sholes' patent for the 'type-writer' and began shipping it in 1874. By 1878, the typewriter included both capital and small letters. In 1877, a contest was held between a typist using a 2-row caligraph, and one using a 4-row Remington keyboard. The contest ended with victory for the 4-row keyboard. Frank McGurren, a court stenographer from Salt Lake City, won $500. Because of this contest, other manufacturers followed Remington, and people began switching from the piano-style keyboard to the familiar 4-row QWERTY keyboard.