Thursday, June 23, 2011

Around 1875, the first keyboards for typewriters were created and their keys were alphabetically arranged. It is said that Christopher Latham Shore, an early inventor of the typewriter, changed them to the QWERTY configuration to make it more difficult to type fast and jam the key bars. -- M. Castillo: "QWERTY, @, &, #", American Journal of Neuroradiology, Vol.32, No.4 (April 2011), pp.613-614.

His name was Christopher Latham Sholes, not Shore. In the 1860's he used alphabetically-arranged keyboards, but in April, 1870, he moved to non-alphabetical. Furthermore, he never intended to make it more difficult to type fast on the QWERTY keyboard (cf. Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka: "On the Prehistory of QWERTY", ZINBUN, No.42 (March 2011), pp.161-174).