So the jamming issue documented in the historical record may not be related to the letter arrangement at all, but from misuse of the typewriter.Īlso, a contradicting statistical study in 1949 showed that the QWERTY layout in the type basket (the layout of the typebars in a circle where they strike the paper) of the production 1874 model used more close-in-proximity typebars theoretically prone to clash (26%) than a completely random layout (22%). While it’s true that the early typewriter prototypes did jam (according to this first-hand 1918 account), later QWERTY typewriters jammed too if you pushed too many keys at once-this is one of the reasons the inventors quickly transitioned away from a piano keyboard, which made early testers think they could push multiple keys at once. Other than the “ER” combination, analysis has shown that in general, the QWERTY layout does separate the most frequently-used letter combinations fairly well, at least as understood in 1874.īut it’s still not a slam dunk. But if you look back, the original “QWE.TY” layout had placed the “R” in a different location. So if they didn’t want to slow typists down, the inventors still could have been trying to prevent jams during speedy usage by spreading out frequently-used letter combinations like “TH.” Some critics have attacked this by pointing out that the letter combination “ER” is one of the most frequently used in English, and yet those two letters are right there, side-by-side, in the QWERTY layout.
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