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Keyboard letter pattern helped stop jamming
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How did the letters on the keyboard come to be in the odd pattern they are? Who did it and why? -- JK
Initially, when printer, newspaperman, engineer and politician Christopher Latham Sholes set out to develop the first commercially practical typewriter, he put the keys in an alphabetical pattern.
But the bars that made the impressions on the paper in his early versions jammed when users typed common letter combinations. So Sholes and his partners devised a new pattern that made the bars hit the paper from different angles so the common combinations wouldn't get tangled up, according to an article at about.com.
Whether this new pattern, now called qwerty, also helped resolve the jamming problem simply by slowing down typists is a matter of debate. At any rate, the pattern became ubiquitous, and all attempts to simplify it have failed, even after computers replaced mechanical typewriters.
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