From Typewriter to Keyboard: A History of Typing

Before the Typewriter: The World of Handwriting

For most of human history, writing meant handwriting. Scribes, clerks, and correspondence writers spent their working lives copying text by hand — a slow, expensive, and physically demanding process. A skilled 19th-century clerk could write roughly 25–30 words per minute in a legible hand for sustained periods. Professional penmanship was a valued and taught skill with its own competitions and celebrated practitioners.

The idea of a mechanical writing machine appeared sporadically across Europe from the 1700s onward. At least 52 patents for writing machines were filed before the first commercially successful typewriter reached the market. Most were heavy, impractical, or too slow to be useful — in some cases, slower than handwriting.

Christopher Sholes and the First Commercial Typewriter (1868–1874)

The breakthrough came from Christopher Latham Sholes, a Wisconsin newspaper editor and politician, who filed a typewriter patent on June 23, 1868. Sholes worked with colleagues Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé on successive prototypes through the early 1870s. His machine used a piano-style keyboard and impressed characters by swinging typebars upward to strike an ink ribbon against paper.

In 1873, Sholes sold the rights to his invention to E. Remington and Sons — a company best known for manufacturing firearms and sewing machines. Remington's engineers refined the mechanism and brought the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer to market in 1874, priced at $125 (approximately $3,200 in today's money). It typed only in uppercase.

Sales were slow at first. Mark Twain famously bought one of the early machines and is often cited as the first author to submit a typewritten manuscript to a publisher — though Twain himself was ambivalent about the device, later claiming to have grown to dislike it.

The QWERTY Layout and the Myth Around It

The QWERTY keyboard layout was developed by Sholes through the late 1860s and early 1870s. The most persistent popular theory holds that QWERTY was deliberately designed to slow typists down to prevent mechanical typewriter jams. This is almost certainly false.

The actual history is more nuanced. Early typewriter typebars were arranged in a circular basket, and letters used in rapid succession in common English digraphs (letter pairs like TH, HE, IN, ER) needed to be physically separated to reduce the chance of adjacent bars clashing and jamming. The QWERTY arrangement reflects this mechanical constraint — it places commonly paired letters away from each other — but it was not intended to reduce speed. It was intended to make higher-speed typing mechanically possible.

Economist Paul David argued in 1985 that QWERTY persisted through "path dependence" — once millions of people learned the layout and it was taught in schools, switching costs became prohibitive regardless of whether better alternatives existed. Researchers Liebowitz and Margolis later challenged this view, arguing QWERTY was never proven to be significantly inferior. The debate in economics and technology history continues.

The Rise of Touch Typing (1880s)

Early typewriter users typed with their eyes on the keys, using only two or four fingers. The method known as touch typing — using all ten fingers without looking at the keyboard — was systematised by Frank Edward McGurrin, a court stenographer in Salt Lake City, in the late 1880s.

McGurrin had memorised the keyboard layout and could type without looking at his hands. In 1888 he entered a widely publicised typing competition in Cincinnati against Louis Taub, who used a four-finger visual method on a different keyboard layout. McGurrin won by a large margin. The demonstration attracted national attention and accelerated the adoption of touch typing as the professional standard.

Typing schools proliferated through the 1890s and early 1900s. By 1910, touch typing was standard in business offices and considered an essential clerical skill, especially for women — who made up the majority of the early commercial typing workforce.

The Electric Typewriter and IBM Selectric (1961)

Electric typewriters began appearing in the 1920s but the defining machine of the mid-20th century was the IBM Selectric, introduced in 1961. Instead of individual typebars, the Selectric used a spherical "golf ball" element that rotated and tilted to the correct letter before striking the paper. This eliminated jamming entirely, allowed interchangeable typefaces, and produced cleaner, more consistent type.

The Selectric dominated business offices for two decades. By the late 1970s, IBM had sold over 13 million Selectrics. Its keyboard design — lower travel, lighter touch, consistent feel — also influenced the design of the first computer keyboards.

Computer Keyboards and the Transition (1970s–1980s)

The shift from typewriters to computer keyboards happened rapidly in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Early personal computers like the Apple II (1977) and IBM PC (1981) used keyboards physically derived from typewriter design — QWERTY layout, similar key spacing, mechanical switches beneath each key.

The critical difference was feedback. On a typewriter, each keystroke produced immediate physical output — ink on paper. On a computer keyboard, the keystroke triggered a buffer, a display update, and potentially complex software responses. Touch typists adapted quickly; hunt-and-peck typists found the transition more difficult, since the visual feedback loop changed.

Membrane keyboards — where keys press against a flat membrane rather than actuating individual mechanical switches — became standard in the 1990s due to cost savings. The trade-off was tactile feedback: membrane keyboards offered less distinct "click" sensation per keypress, which some typists found disorienting.

The Mechanical Keyboard Revival (2010s–Present)

From roughly 2012 onward, a community of enthusiasts began reviving interest in mechanical keyboards — those using individual mechanical switches beneath each key, similar in principle to the typewriter mechanisms of the 1960s. The mechanical keyboard hobby exploded through 2015–2020, driven by gaming communities (who valued the faster actuation of certain switch types) and professional typists seeking better tactile feedback.

Today the market offers hundreds of switch variants, keyboard layouts ranging from full 104-key to ultra-compact 40% designs, and custom-built keyboards costing several hundred to several thousand dollars. The shift reflects an increasing recognition — backed by ergonomics research — that keyboard feel, travel, and resistance affect both typing speed and long-term comfort.

The Dvorak Alternative

In 1932, educational psychologist August Dvorak patented an alternative keyboard layout designed using the letter-frequency data and ergonomic principles available at the time. The Dvorak Simplified Keyboard places the most common English letters (A, O, E, U, I, D, H, T, N, S) on the home row, theoretically reducing finger travel and switching between hands more frequently.

Controlled studies comparing QWERTY and Dvorak have produced mixed results. Some show modest speed advantages for Dvorak after retraining; others show no significant difference. Dvorak's most famous champion was Barbara Blackburn, the former world speed record holder. Despite decades of advocacy, QWERTY remains dominant — a textbook case of technological lock-in.

Where Typing Stands Today

Typing is now one of the most performed cognitive-motor tasks in human history. A 2018 study at Cambridge analysed 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 participants across 200 countries. The median typing speed was 52 WPM using, on average, only six fingers — far fewer than the ten-finger touch typing method. Most people have developed their own hybrid methods through unguided practice.

Despite the rise of voice input and touchscreens, keyboard typing remains the dominant interface for professional text production. The history of typing is largely a history of humans adapting to tools that were originally designed for mechanical constraints that no longer exist.