QWERTY is a keyboard layout for Latin alphabets and is named for the order of the first six letters in the second row on the upper left of a keyboard or typewriter. The QWERTY layout was first documented in a typewriter patent issued in 1878.
The QWERTZ keyboard, also called Swiss keyboard, is used in German-speaking countries, since Z is more common in German than Y. In France and Belgium, AZERTY is used, and some common lower-case accented letters like é (e-acute) and è (e-grave) have dedicated keys. The letter ù (u-grave) also has its own key. Spain and Latin America kept QWERTY but with the addition of Ñ, a widely used character in Spanish.
The QWERTY layout is attributed to American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes. He developed the typewriter with an alphabetically arranged keyboard with Samuel W. Soulé, James Densmore, and Carlos Glidden. Their typewriter was patented in 1868 and named the Sholes & Glidden.
The original keyboard layout had the second half of the alphabet in order on the top row and the first half of the alphabet in order on the bottom row. However, that layout may have caused mechanical issues when common letter pairings that were alphabetically near or next to each other, such as "ST," would cause the keys mounted on metal arms to jam when typed quickly in succession. Some researchers debate this, including Kyoto University's Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka. They published a paper in 2011 putting forward a theory that the QWERTY layout was developed from the input of telegraph operators. Early typewriter adopters and beta-testers included telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. However, the operators found the alphabetical arrangement confusing and inefficient for translating morse code.
The layout of the letter keys changed over time, likely to both reduce jamming and speed up typing. Sholes went through several design iterations. He eventually revised the keyboard layout to QWERTY and filed a patent that was later issued in 1878, U.S. Patent No. 207,559. This is the first documented sighting of the QWERTY layout.
In 1873, Sholes and his partners entered into a manufacturing agreement with gun-maker Remington. The deal was considered a result of Remington seeking a new business line after the end of the Civil War when its guns were in less demand. They took an interest in the typewriter because they had the capability to manufacture precision equipment.
By 1890, there were more than 100,000 QWERTY-based Remington typewriters in use across the United States. Some historians also cite Remington's typing training program with the mass adoption of QWERTY. In 1893, the five largest typewriter manufacturers—Remington, Caligraph, Yost, Densmore, and Smith-Premier—merged to form the Union Typewriter Company and agreed to adopt QWERTY as the de facto standard.
