The typewriter that gave us QWERTY was patented
On this day · 23 June 1868
A Milwaukee printer's "type-writing machine" earned a patent in 1868 and seeded the keyboard layout still under your fingers.
On June 23, 1868, printer and editor Christopher Latham Sholes, working with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, received U.S. Patent 79,265 for an “Improvement in Type-Writing Machines.” The Milwaukee trio had filed the previous October after several scrapped attempts at a practical writing machine.
The patent covered the machinery, not the famous key order, which Sholes kept tinkering with for years afterward. Early arrangements jammed when fast typists struck neighboring bars in quick succession, so the layout was reshuffled to space out common letter pairs.
The result was the QWERTY arrangement, named for the first six keys of the top letter row. Sholes eventually sold the rights to Remington, which marketed the machine commercially in 1873.
A layout designed to slow down jamming type bars now outlives the typewriters it was built for.
More than 150 years later, billions of keyboards and touchscreens still inherit that same order.
Sources & references
2 referencesWell-established. Corroborated by 2 independent sources.
