Pictured in the featured image is my Remington Standard 12 typewriter from circa 1925, with a Swedish keyboard. Remington is notable as a brand of typewriter because their first two typewriters introduced features that are still in use today on computer keyboards across the world.

🦋
Psst. Just a quick note to say that if you are on Bluesky you can now find me there as @axbom.com – I wrote about the benefits of having your domain name as your username in a separate blog post (see suggested reading at the bottom).

Now, get back to reading about typewriters!

Feature 1: Qwerty

The Qwerty keyboard layout was invented by Christopher Latham Sholes in 1868 and adopted by the first Remington typewriter in 1873.

Many people believe that the Qwerty keyboard layout deliberately placed keys to slow down typists, so that the typebars (the moving bars holding the hammers with the letters) wouldn't get jammed. But that's only partly right.

What Sholes did was place letters that were frequently used together far apart from each other in the mechanical circle that held the typebars. So for example the common letter pair "TH" meant that the respective typebars for T and H had to be hung far apart. This enabled typists to type faster, not slower, because it was now less likely for the typebars to get jammed. It wasn't perfect, but better.

0:00
/0:06

Typing faster without typebars getting caught on each other was made easier when certain letter keys were moved further apart from each other.

What you also may not know is that the original patent by Sholes for the Qwerty keyboard layout had the keys placed like this: