Editing QWERTY (section)

==History==
{{Main|Typewriter|Sholes and Glidden typewriter}}
[[File:Continental Standard typewriter keyboard - key detail.jpg|thumb|upright|Keys are arranged on diagonal columns to give space for the levers.]]
The QWERTY layout was devised and created in the early 1870s by [[Christopher Latham Sholes]], a [[newspaper]] editor and printer who lived in [[Kenosha]], [[Wisconsin]]. In October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine he developed with the assistance of his friends [[Carlos Glidden]] and [[Samuel W. Soule|Samuel W. Soulé]].<ref name="USPatent79868">{{cite patent |inventor-last=Shole |inventor-first=C. Latham |inventorlink=C. Latham Sholes |inventor2-last=Glidden |inventor2-first=Carlos |inventorlink2=Carlos Glidden |inventor3-last=Soule |inventor3-first=Samuel W. |inventorlink3=Samuel W. Soule |issue-date=14 July 1868 |title=Improvement in Type-writing Machines |country-code=US |patent-number=79868}}</ref>

The first model constructed by Sholes used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically as shown below:<ref name="USPatent79868" />
<pre>- 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M</pre>

Sholes struggled for the next five years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement. The study of [[bigram frequency|bigram (letter-pair) frequency]] by educator Amos Densmore, brother of the financial backer [[James Densmore]], is believed to have influenced the array of letters, although this contribution has been called into question.<ref name="Yasuoka2011">{{cite journal |first1=Koichi |last1=Yasuoka |first2=Motoko |last2=Yasuoka |doi=10.14989/139379 |url=https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/139379/1/42_161.pdf |title=On the Prehistory of QWERTY |date=March 2011 |journal=ZINBUN |volume=42 |page=161{{ndash}}174 |s2cid=53616602 |access-date=14 December 2021 |archive-date=18 September 2021 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210918164426/https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/139379/1/42_161.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref>{{rp|170}} Others suggest instead that the letter groupings evolved from [[telegraph]] operators' feedback.<ref name="Yasuoka2011" />{{rp|163}}

In November 1868 he changed the arrangement of the latter half of the alphabet, N to Z, right-to-left.<ref name="Yasuoka2008">{{cite book |first1=Koichi |last1=Yasuoka |first2=Motoko |last2=Yasuoka |title=Myth of QWERTY Keyboard |location=Tokyo |publisher=NTT Publishing |date=2008 |isbn=9784757141766 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=tEsAMggMKoMC&pg=PA8 |access-date=3 November 2016 |archive-date=9 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230309183000/https://books.google.com/books?id=tEsAMggMKoMC&pg=PA8 |url-status=live }}</ref>{{rp|12–20}} In April 1870 he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard, moving six vowel letters, A, E, I, O, U, and Y, to the upper row as follows:<ref name="Yasuoka2008" />{{rp|24–25}}
<pre>
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 -
A E I . ? Y U O ,
B C D F G H J K L M
Z X W V T S R Q P N</pre>

In 1873 Sholes's backer, James Densmore, successfully sold the manufacturing rights for the Sholes & Glidden Type-Writer to [[E. Remington and Sons]]. The keyboard layout was finalized within a few months by Remington's mechanics and was ultimately presented:<ref name="Yasuoka2011" />{{rp|161–174}}
<pre>
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,
Q W E . T Y I U O P
Z S D F G H J K L M
A X & C V B N ? ; R</pre>

After they purchased the device, Remington made several adjustments, creating a keyboard with essentially the modern QWERTY layout. These adjustments included placing the "R" key in the place previously allotted to the period key. Apocryphal claims that this change was made to let salesmen impress customers by pecking out the brand name "TYPE WRITER QUOTE" from one keyboard row is not formally substantiated.<ref name="Yasuoka2011" /> Vestiges of the original alphabetical layout remained in the "[[home row]]" sequence DFGHJKL.<ref name="david" >{{citation |last=David |first=Paul A. |title=Clio and the Economics of QWERTY |journal=[[American Economic Review]] |volume=75 |issue=2 |pages=332–337 |year=1985 |publisher=American Economic Association|jstor=1805621 }}</ref>

The modern [[American National Standards Institute|ANSI]] layout is:
<pre>1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
Q W E R T Y U I O P [ ] \
A S D F G H J K L ; '
Z X C V B N M , . /</pre>
[[File:Remington 2 typewriter (Martin Howard Collection).jpg|thumb|Remington 2 typewriter, 1878 – First typewriter with a shift key for upper and lower case characters]]
The QWERTY layout became popular with the success of the Remington No. 2 of 1878, the first typewriter to include both upper and lower case letters, using a {{keypress|[[shift key|Shift]]}} key.

One popular but possibly apocryphal<ref name="Yasuoka2011" />{{rp|162}} explanation for the QWERTY arrangement is that it was designed to reduce the likelihood of internal clashing of typebars by placing commonly used combinations of letters farther from each other inside the machine.<ref name="David, P.A. 1986">David, P. A. (1986). "Understanding the Economics of QWERTY: the Necessity of History". In Parker, William N., ''Economic History and the Modern Economist''. Basil Blackwell, New York and Oxford.</ref>

===Differences from modern layout===

==== Substituting characters ====
[[File:QWERTY 1878.png|thumb|right|upright 1.25|Christopher Latham Sholes's 1878 QWERTY keyboard layout]]
The QWERTY layout depicted in Sholes's 1878 patent is slightly different from the modern layout, most notably in the absence of the numerals 0 and 1, with each of the remaining numerals shifted one position to the left of their modern counterparts. The letter M is located at the end of the third row to the right of the letter L rather than on the fourth row to the right of the N, the letters X and C are reversed, and most [[Punctuation|punctuation marks]] are in different positions or are missing entirely.<ref name="patent">{{cite patent
 | inventor-last = Sholes
 | inventor-first = Christopher Latham
 | issue-date = 27 August 1878
 | title =
 | country-code = US
 | description =
 | patent-number = 207559
}}</ref> 0 and 1 were omitted to simplify the design and reduce the manufacturing and maintenance costs; they were chosen specifically because they were "redundant" and could be recreated using other keys. Typists who learned on these machines learned the habit of using the uppercase letter [[I]] (or lowercase letter [[L]]) for the digit one, and the uppercase [[O]] for the zero.<ref name="Weller" >{{Citation
  | last = Weller| first = Charles Edward
  | year = 1918
  | url = https://archive.org/details/earlyhistorytyp00wellgoog
  |title=The early history of the typewriter
  | place = La Porte, Indiana| publisher = Chase & Shepard, printers
| hdl = 2027/nyp.33433006345817
  | hdl-access = free
  }}</ref>

The 0 key was added and standardized in its modern position early in the history of the typewriter, but the 1 and exclamation point were left off some typewriter keyboards into the 1970s.<ref>See for example the [http://www.mrmartinweb.com/type.htm#olivetti Olivetti Lettera 36] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080827184348/http://www.mrmartinweb.com/type.htm#olivetti |date=27 August 2008 }}, introduced in 1972</ref>

==== Combined characters ====
{{See also|Dead keys}}
In early designs, some characters were produced by printing two symbols with the [[typewriter carriage|carriage]] in the same position. For instance, the [[Exclamation mark|exclamation point]], which shares a key with the numeral 1 on post-mechanical keyboards, could be reproduced by using a three-stroke combination of an apostrophe, a backspace, and a period. A semicolon (;) was produced by printing a comma (,) over a colon (:). As the backspace key is slow in simple mechanical typewriters (the carriage was heavy and optimized to move in the opposite direction), a more professional approach was to block the carriage by pressing and holding the space bar while printing all characters that needed to be in a shared position. To make this possible, the carriage was designed to advance only after releasing the space bar.

In the era of mechanical typewriters, combined characters such as ''é'' and ''õ'' were created by the use of [[dead key]]s for the [[diacritic]]s (''′, ~''), which did not move the paper forward. Thus the ''′'' and ''e'' would be printed at the same location on the paper, creating ''é''.

===Contemporaneous alternatives===
[[File:Crandall 1, 1883.jpg|thumb|Crandall 1, 1883]]
There were no particular technological requirements for the QWERTY layout,<ref name="Yasuoka2011" /> since at the time there were ways to make a typewriter without the "up-stroke" typebar mechanism that had required it to be devised. Not only were there rival machines with "down-stroke" and "front stroke" positions that gave a visible printing point, the problem of typebar clashes could be circumvented completely: examples include [[Thomas Edison]]'s 1872 electric print-wheel device which later became the basis for [[Teleprinter|Teletype]] machines; [[Lucien Stephen Crandall]]'s typewriter (the second to come onto the American market in 1883) whose type was arranged on a cylindrical sleeve; the [[Hammond Typewriter|Hammond typewriter]] of 1885 which used a semi-circular "type-shuttle" of hardened rubber (later light metal); and the [[Blickensderfer typewriter]] of 1893 which used a type wheel. The early Blickensderfer's "Ideal" keyboard was also non-QWERTY, instead having the sequence "DHIATENSOR" in the [[home row]], these 10 letters being capable of composing 70% of the words in the English language.<ref>{{cite book|last=Shermer|first=Michael|title=The mind of the market|year=2008|publisher=Macmillan|isbn=978-0-8050-7832-9|page=[https://archive.org/details/mindofmarketcomp00sher/page/50 50]|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/mindofmarketcomp00sher/page/50}}</ref>