QWERTY is a keyboard design for Latin-script alphabets. The name comes from the order of the first six keys on the top letter row of the keyboard. It was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Latham Sholes (1819 –1890), a newspaper editor and printer. In October 1867, Sholes filed a patent application for his early writing machine. This model used a piano-like keyboard with two rows of characters arranged alphabetically:

- 3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M

This had two flaws that made the product susceptible to jams. Firstly, characters were mounted on metal arms or type bars, which would clash and jam if neighbouring arms were pressed at the same time or in rapid succession. Secondly, its printing point was located beneath the paper carriage. As a result, jams were especially serious, because the typist could only discover the mishap by raising the carriage to inspect what had been typed. The solution was to place commonly used letter-pairs (like "th" or "st") so that their type bars were not neighbouring.

Sholes struggled for the next five years to perfect his invention, making trial-and-error rearrangements of the original alphabetical key layout. In 1873 Sholes's backer sold the manufacturing rights for the Sholes modified model to E. Remington and Sons. Details of the layout were finalised within a few months by Remington's mechanics. The keyboard with the modern QWERTY layout was born.

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