By Brad Hundt. Staff Writer

bhundt@observer-reporter.com

Nancy Johnson has been typing "forever" and has never given much thought to the way the letters are arranged on the keyboard.

"It just comes automatically, thank goodness," said Johnson, a longtime office manager who most recently worked at First Presbyterian Church in Washington. "If I thought about it, I'd probably have a problem."

Johnson is just one of millions of people who use a computer keyboard every day and don't think twice about why B is next to N or why some semblance of alphabetical order happens in the middle of the keyboard, where D, F, G, H, J, K and L are all lined up in a row.

Well, it turns out there's some method to the madness that is the "QWERTY" keyboard, named after the five letters that are in the upper left-hand corner. It was devised, as a matter of fact, by a native of Montour County.

In 1867, Christopher Sholes submitted a patent application for a "Type-Writer." At the time, he was a newspaper publisher and politician in Milwaukee, having decamped to Wisconsin after completing a printing apprenticeship in Danville. The "Type-Writer" was supposed to speed the writing process, according to Jim Bredeson, the reference librarian at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, Wis.

"When they were first marketing it, they said it was faster than the pen," he said. "It was something that was going to speed up writing. It wasn't really intended for the publishing world."

Originally, all the letters were in alphabetical order on Sholes' first keyboard. One of the first things that Sholes ever typed on his contraption was a letter sent to a friend in the oil business in Meadville. But there were several problems with his prototype, perhaps most urgently the tendency of typebars to jam when copy was being speedily pounded out.

To combat this, Sholes came up with the QWERTY keyboard, which would keep apart letters that were most often used consecutively. The date of QWERTY's arrival falls somewhere around 1872.

"Basically, you get a random configuration of the keyboard," according to Paul Robert, a Dutch journalist who created the online Virtual Typewriter Museum (it can be found at www.typewritermuseum.org). "There's no logic behind it. That's just the way the earliest machines worked best."

Sholes' QWERTY keyboard isn't the only kind that's ever been whipped up, but it's the one that's lasted. Perhaps the most serious attempt ever made at unseating QWERTY from its place in the keyboard pantheon is the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, which was patented in 1936 and places the letters P, Y, F, G, C, R and L in the top row, after the comma and the "greater than" and "less than" symbols. Created by August Dvorak, a professor of education at the University of Washington-Seattle, it was designed to reduce wear and tear for typists by keeping the most commonly used letters, including A, O and E, in the middle row, where hands mostly rest while typing, and under the strongest fingers.

Even though the Dvorak keyboard is included in some computer operating systems, it's generally ended up like Betamax videotapes and HD DVDs - a distant runner-up in a format war. According to Robert, once you've learned to type, the location of letters on the keyboard is irrelevant.

"You're so used to where those letters are, it doesn't matter where they are."

In 1949, historian Richard N. Current wrote that the development of the typewriter made possible "the growth of both big business and big government." Mary Ann Badia, a typing instructor at Penn Commercial in Washington, usually asks her students to research the history of the typewriter and "they're surprised that the keyboard dates back to 1872," she said.

Home