History of typewriters and QWERTY keyboard: All you need to know

In 1867, the American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes was inspired by an article he read about a new British-invented machine like the typewriter. He went on to create his own rendition of the machine that the first practical typewriter. His second model was the first successfully used typewriter, which was patented on June 23, 1868. It wrote at a speed far exceeding that of handwriting.

However, it was a crude machine, and Sholes added many improvements in the next few years, finally reaching an arrangement of four rows of numbers and letters that the QWERTY keyboard would later adopt.

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

(Keyboard layout in Sholes' 1868 prototype)

This became the foundation for the QWERTY layout. Later, Sholes faced difficulty in raising funds to continue his work and had to sell his patent rights. He sold the rights for $12,000 to the Remington Arms Company.

The Remington Company made several modifications in the original design, and later it was marketed as the Remington Typewriter. With inputs from Sholes, the keyboard was rearranged to a somewhat familiar layout.

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

Another change, where the ‘.’ was replaced by ‘R’ in the layout led to the birth of the now-common QWERTY layout.

Sholes, who insisted on the change, patented the QWERTY layout in 1878 and the Sholes & Gidden typewriter went into production in 1874.

Later, in 1878 Remington introduced a new model which had the shift key. This was the first typewriter to type in both lower and upper-case letters.