QWERTY keyboard is widely used for information processing nowadays
in Japan, United States, and other countries. And the most frequently asked
question about the keyboard is: “Why are the letters of the keyboard arranged
the way they are?” Several papers in the field of information processing answer
the question like this: “To slow down the operator.” It’s nonsense.
In this paper we reveal the prehistory of QWERTY keyboard along the his-
tory of telegraph apparatus: Morse, Hughes-Phelps, and Teletype. The early
keyboard of Type-Writer was derived from Hughes-Phelps Printing Telegraph,
and it was developed for Morse receivers. The keyboard arrangement very
often changed during the development, and accidentally grew into QWERTY
among the different requirements. QWERTY was adopted by Teletype in the
1910’s, and Teletype was widely used as a computer terminal later.