Excerpt from Alphabetical by Michael Rosen, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Q is for Querty

THOUGH I MEET up with the alphabet every day, it doesn't come in alphabetical order. It is presented to me as QWERTYUIOP. Prior to the invention of the qwerty keyboard on the early typewriters, the word 'alphabet' meant two things at the same time: the letters that we use and alphabetical order or 'the ABC'. Both physically and mentally, the alphabet was stored alphabetically. The peoples who used the alphabet didn't really have another way of conceptualizing it.

Now, though, I sit down and select letters from a store that is arranged completely differently. One peculiarity of this is that I can recite the alphabet in a few seconds, I can touch-type, but I can't recite qwerty. So I know these two methods of storing the letters in different ways. If you arranged a dictionary or register of people at a conference in qwerty order, most of us would be lost. Yet I can't help feeling that qwerty, in its own way, subverts the orthodoxy of the alphabet. Day after day, for millions of people worldwide, it demands that we go to it and to its own special way of ordering literacy. The ABC alphabet has bitten back, though: the keyboards on our phones are in alphabetical order. As a qwerty-trained typist, I find it confusing to collect my pre-paid tickets from a machine on a railway station if the on-screen keyboard, looking exactly like a qwerty one, is arranged in alphabetical order. I can't find the letters to punch in my code!

Qwerty people have a hidden side: we have had relationships with different machines all through our lives, sometimes loving, sometimes resentful, sometimes dominant, sometimes being dominated. Part of our biography is in the play of our fingers over keys.


The story of the qwerty keyboard is intimately connected to a man called Charles Latham Sholes, who was one of the forces behind the abolition of capital punishment in Wisconsin. In 1851, John McCaffary, an Irish immigrant, had been sentenced to death and before a crowd of some 2,000–3,000 people he was hanged from a tree. McCaffary remained alive for some twenty minutes before eventually dying. This spectacle gave added strength to the campaign to abolish the death penalty, led by Sholes, first as a newspaper man for the Kenosha Telegraph and then as a senator in the Wisconsin Assembly. When the abolition bill was passed on 12 July 1853, John McCaffary became both the first and the last person to be executed in the state of Wisconsin.

It was Sholes and his friends who first created a typing machine that could be exploited commercially and it was Sholes in conjunction with a business associate, James Densmore, who first came up with the qwerty keyboard in 1873. By then, the patent was in the hands of Remington and the world's first qwerty typewriter – or QWERTY typewriter (it was upper case only) – appeared on 1 July 1874. It was the 'Remington No. 1', also known to aficionados as the 'Sholes and Glidden' after its designers.



Clearly, 'qwertyuiop' on a top row, 'asdfghjkl' on a second, and 'zxcvbnm' on a third, is a long way from 'ABCDEFGHIJ', 'KLMNOPQRS' and 'TUVWXYZ'. This layout came about because the model of typewriter Sholes, Soule and Densmore were playing with, using 'ABC', caused the 'typebars' (the thin metal arms on the end of which were the letters) to collide and jam. Densmore figured that the problem lay in letter frequency, the number of times a letter was used in English writing. He asked his son-in-law, a school superintendent in Pennsylvania, to tell him which letters and letter combinations appear most frequently. The trick to avoid the clashing was to place the most commonly occurring letters (on the end of their respective type- bars) as far apart as possible. The easiest way to make this happen mechanically, was to arrange the keyboard like this:

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 – ,

Excerpted from Alphabetical by Michael Rosen. Copyright © 2015 by Michael Rosen. Excerpted by permission of Counterpoint Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.