History | Updated: February 25, 2025 | Originally Published: May 3, 2013 The invention’s true origin story has long been the subject of debate. Some argue it was created to prevent typewriter jams, ...

How did the keys on your keyboard wind up in the QWERTY configuration? You can thank Christopher Latham Sholes. He was a typewriter inventor who used a top row layout of letters eerily similar to ...

It's rare these days to see anyone pounding away on an old manual Royal or Smith-Corona. But one element of those machines lives on, and is used constantly in daily life. Just as Milwaukee is the ...

The selection was rather limited last year for people who wanted to purchase a phone-enabled mobile device with a QWERTY thumb keyboard. You had the ever popular RIM BlackBerry models targeted to the ...

Qwerty was the brainchild of Milwaukee port official Christopher Sholes Look down from the screen on which you are reading this, and wonder. Q-W-E-R-T-Y. How on earth did this pattern of letters get ...

Posts from this topic will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years ...

If you answered yes, we have some bad news because you are probably wrong. It turns out the QWERTY layout — a keyboard that has “Q”, “W”, “E”, “R”, “T”, and “Y” as the first keys from the left on the ...

UPDATE: The results of the QWERTY study described in this story were questioned by independent researchers, and the study authors have responded to the criticisms. See note below. A keyboard's ...

Look down from the screen on which you are reading this, and wonder. Q-W-E-R-T-Y. How on earth did this pattern of letters get so locked into our language? It seems so random. Patchily alphabetic, and ...