Newspaper editor’s keyboard design is still used in iPhone

Design Matters: The Qwerty keyboard, c. 1874

The 10th birthday of Apple’s iPhone was well publicised last month, and its ingenuity and game-changing features much celebrated. However one design feature of the ubiquitous device is much older – the QWERTY keyboard that so helpfully pops up when you need to text. Its invention is usually attributed to Christopher Latham Sholes, an American newspaper editor. Working with two colleagues, he invented, in 1868, what they called a Type-Writer. They sold the patent to the Remington company which in 1874 produced the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, later marketed as the Remington Number 1. The original keyboard design had the keys in alphabetical order over two rows but practical problems quickly emerged. The S and T keys were beside each other but as they are so frequently used together in the English language they became tangled and stuck; same with the H and I and the N and O. Sholes kept working on the keyboard design until he came up with the QWERTY layout, with the numbers in the top line, although initially it didn’t feature the numbers 0 or 1 as these could easily be made with the letter keys. Another layout idea he had, the XPMCHR keyboard, never took off although he had such faith in it that he patented it. By 1900 several typewriter manufacturers had amalgamated to form the Union Typewriter Company and they adopted the QWERTY format as the standard, thereby sealing its future.