Editing QWERTY (section)

===Prehistory===
The ''Printing Telegraph'', invented in 1846 had a keyboard similar to a piano with two rows of letters in alphabetical order offset 1/2 key from one-another.
David Edward Hughes' improved models from the 1860's onwards tended to have 28 keys with letters in alphabetical order from left to right on the top row and from right to left on the bottom row.
Digits and punctuation were entered on the top row together with a shifting mechanism. Each shifted symbol was printed above the key's unshifted symbol.<ref name="davidedwardhughestelegraph4"/>

Christopher Latham Sholes is the man most credited (or blamed) for having created QWERTY.
Besides being an inventor, he was a newspaper man and politician in 1860's Milwaukee, USA.
In 1868 he had together with Carlos Glidden, William Soulé and Frank Haven Hall
manufactured and marketed a desktop "Type-Writer" with a piano-like keyboard similar to Hughes' telegraph's.
It was sold to companies with telegraphists who received American Morse code and needed to type it quickly.
The mechanism did not have any Shifting-mechanism and could type only upper-case letters.
A machine with digits on the left hand side may have been manufactured for a time.

Sholes parted ways with the others and continued to develop the machine with a new keyboard, backed by financier James Densmore.
In 1870, Sholes produced a keyboard with four rows with digits and more symbols.
The keyboards have been lost before they could be drawn or photographed but some details of the layout are known from correspondence with early adopters.
It was most likely inspired also by John Pratt's earlier type-writing machine, the ''Pterograph'' that Sholes had read about in Scientific American.
Digits were on a separate top row, mimicking earlier keyboards without the need for a shifting mechanism.
Like Pratt's pterotype, the letters I and O were used for digits 1 and 0 - a cost-saving measure which persisted among some manufacturers until the 1970's.
The second row from the top had vowels and symbols.
Consonants were on the two bottom rows but still in alphabetical order as before.
Around this time, the [[Space bar]] was introduced and '''W''' was moved to the top row because it was a semi-vowel.

It is known that feedback from several early customers and beta-testers further influenced the layout, although not all detail are known.
''Harrington and Craig Telegraph Works'' in New York even demanded several changes as a condition for purchase of type-writers. It is unknown which those were but it has been speculated that the reason why '''Z''', '''S''' and '''E''' are close together is because the Morse code for 'Z' is close to the code sequence for "SE" and they wanted to minimize hand movement<ref name="yasuoka11"/>.

The August 10 1872 issue of ''Scientific American'' (Volume 27, issue 6) features a copperplate picture of the "Type-Writer" on the first page. It is the first image of a proto-QWERTY keyboard ("QWE.TY") in print.

<gallery widths=300>
File:Printingtelegraph-layout.png|Typical layout of a Printing Telegraph keyboard like those made by Hughes from 1867 until the 1930's.
Digits were accessed through a shifting mechanism. The blank key on the left is the [[Space bar|Space]] key.
File:Pterotype-layout.png|Layout of John Pratt's Pterotype machines produced from 1864. Prototypes and patents had various different layouts.
File:Protoqwerty1870-layout.png|Presumed layout of Sholes' 1870 machine used by early adopters.
File:Sciam1872-layout.png|Keyboard layout on the cover of Scientific American volume 27, issue 6 (August 10 1872)
</gallery>