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QWERTY is perhaps one of the most ubiquitous keyboard layouts in the world and its story unfolds with a 19th-century typewriter fix.
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The story of QWERTY dates back over 150 years to 1868, when Christopher Latham Sholes, along with his colleagues, patented the world’s first commercially successful typewriter.
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Sholes designed the “QWE.TY” layout to prevent the typewriter jams, which often occurred when people typed too fast on a sequential keyboard. It spaced out common letter combinations.
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Sholes and his colleagues eventually left the project with James Densmore, who sold it to arms manufacturer E. Remington and Sons in 1873.
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E. Remington made several adjustments to the typewriter, including replacing the “.” in QWE.TY with “R”, giving the world the legendary QWERTY.
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Also known as Remington No. 1, this typewriter was launched on the market on July 1, 1874.
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While the first model received a lukewarm response from the public, its second iteration, Remington No. 2, was better accepted.
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In 1886, E. Remington and Sons sold its typewriter business to Standard Typewriter Manufacturing Company, which changed its name to Remington Typewriter Company.
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However, Remington began to lose sales to companies with better designs. In 1893, Remington proposed a merger with several other large typewriter makers.
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The companies in the newly formed typewriter union began using QWERTY as the layout for their typewriter models, thus making it an industry standard.
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By the beginning of the 20th century, the typewriter had created new job roles like typists and secretaries, which were largely filled by women.
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By 1910, half of American high schools provided “touch typing” courses and by 1918, they began teaching the curriculum using Remington typewriters (QWERTY layout).
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The QWERTY keyboard layout is common in the English-speaking world, but other layouts like AZERTY and Dvorak are often used in European and non-English-speaking countries.
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