A TYPEWRITER KEYBOARD SERIES

The first commercially successful typewriter was designed by Christopher Lantham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, Samuel W. This was the first typewriter that could produce printed text faster than a human could write by hand. The layout of the keys on the Malling-Hansen writing ball was not random the most commonly used letters were directly underneath the fastest writing fingers. You could not see the letters as they were typed. This device was a dome studded with keys, each one pressing a hammer down on a piece of paper. One of the first typewriters to use a single key for each character was the Malling-Hansen writing ball, invented in 1865. Pratt’s ‘Petrotype’ used seventeen keys to move a metal plate along columns and rows of characters.

A TYPEWRITER KEYBOARD SERIES

While Pratt’s device used a series of keys arranged in a matrix, it was certainly not what we are accustomed to today. The Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, invented in 1865 This device, created by John Pratt, used a type plate that moved horizontally and vertically, using a hammer to press one letter at a time into a piece of paper. The first mention of a machine with keys used to write on a piece of paper with a sheet of carbon paper was in the Jissue of Scientific American. Little other information exists about this device, but if one thing is clear: this device did not mark a piece of paper with ink carbon paper was not invented until one hundred years later. In other words, a device that would emboss paper with letters. The invention of any keyboard layout begins with the invention of a typewriter, and the excessively arguable inventor of the typewriter is Henry Mill, an English inventor who in 1714 obtained a patent for a device “for impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another, so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print, very useful in settlements and public records”. The First Typewriters The announcement of a type writing machine in the Jissue of Scientific American QWERTY didn’t come out of thin air, though, but folk tale history of this keyboard layout is sadly deficient. This doesn’t mean there’s not a method behind the madness of QWERTY – it’s just not as simple as jammed typewriter mechanisms or appeasing the wishes of salesmen in the 1870s. For that matter, wouldn’t a sales pitch be more impressive if TYPE WRITER were typed with one hand? Why would the top row and not the home row be so privileged as to contain all the letters the make up the name of the machine. It’s also been called a marketing ploy Stephen Jay Gould popularized the idea of the QWERTY keyboard being as it is so a salesman could peck out TYPE WRITER on the top row. That’s not the only fallacious argument for the creation of QWERTY.

The reason behind the QWERTY layout isn’t as simple as ‘so the bars for each letter don’t collide with each other.’ That’s nonsense – it would make far more sense to improve the mechanism before changing the arrangement of the keyboard around. There are very few things that are surrounded with as much hearsay and rumor as the origins of the QWERTY layout of typewriters and keyboards.

A typewriter keyboard