History of Typing

Early Typewriters

Before typewriters, every document was handwritten. The speed and legibility of text production were limited by the writer's hand — a hard ceiling that created bottlenecks in government, commerce, and law. The invention of the typewriter broke that ceiling entirely.

Christopher Latham Sholes, along with collaborators Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, developed the first practical typewriter and received a patent for it in 1868. After several years of refinement, they sold the rights to E. Remington and Sons in 1873. Remington began commercial production of the Sholes and Glidden typewriter in 1874, and it became the first commercially successful typewriter in America.

Early typewriters were slow-selling at first — the public did not immediately understand what to do with them. But businesses quickly recognized the value of clean, fast, legible documents. By the 1880s, typewriters were becoming standard office equipment. By 1900, they were indispensable.

The earliest typewriters printed only in uppercase. The shift key — which allowed both upper and lowercase letters on a single key — was introduced in the late 1870s by Remington and became standard thereafter.

The Origin of QWERTY

The QWERTY keyboard layout — the arrangement most people use today — was designed by Sholes and became standard with the Remington typewriter. The story most often told is that QWERTY was arranged to prevent type bar jamming: when two adjacent keys were struck quickly, their metal arms could lock together. Sholes reportedly separated commonly paired letters to reduce this problem.

This origin story is disputed by some historians, who point out that QWERTY still places many common digraphs (letter pairs) on the same hand. The actual design process appears to have involved multiple iterations responding to customer and salesperson feedback, not a single elegant engineering solution to the jamming problem. But the jamming-prevention explanation is the most widely cited, and it has a mechanical logic that resonates.

Alternative layouts have been proposed and developed since the early 20th century. August Dvorak and William Dealey patented the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard in 1932, claiming it reduced finger movement and increased speed by placing the most common letters on the home row. The Colemak layout (2006) took a similar approach while maintaining more similarity to QWERTY to ease the transition.

Despite decades of alternatives, QWERTY has never been displaced. The reason is network effects and training inertia: every keyboard, every typing teacher, every office worker already knew QWERTY. Switching required retraining millions of people for marginal efficiency gains. This is one of the most cited examples of technological lock-in in history — a suboptimal standard that persists simply because adoption costs exceed the benefits of switching.

Rise of Office Typing

As typewriters spread through offices in the 1880s and 1890s, typing became a professional skill with dedicated training institutions. Typing schools opened in major cities, offering courses that would certify graduates with measurable speed credentials — the 19th-century equivalent of a typing test on a resume.

Typing also became one of the first professional fields to employ women in large numbers. The role of typewriter operator (then simply called a "typewriter," referring to the person rather than the machine) was seen as respectable office work accessible to women with a secondary education. By 1900, women made up the majority of typists in American offices.

The first documented public typing speed competition was held in 1888 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Frank McGurrin, a court stenographer from Salt Lake City, defeated Louis Taub — who used a visual hunting method — by typing faster using a technique we now call touch typing. McGurrin had memorized the keyboard layout and kept his eyes on the source text. His victory was widely reported and dramatically accelerated the adoption of touch typing as the correct professional method.

Typing competitions continued into the early 20th century as both professional showcases and public entertainment. World records in typing speed were tracked and reported in newspapers, creating a culture of typing as a performance discipline that continues in online communities today.

The Computer Era

The introduction of personal computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s brought the keyboard to an entirely new audience. The IBM PC (1981) and Apple Macintosh (1984) made keyboard-based computing accessible to homes and small businesses, and the keyboard became the universal interface for nearly all knowledge work.

Early computer keyboards used mechanical switches — physical mechanisms that clicked and registered each keystroke. Membrane keyboards, which replaced mechanical switches with a pressure-sensitive layer, became common in the 1990s due to their lower manufacturing cost. Many office and consumer keyboards adopted membrane technology, prioritizing price over tactile feel.

A countermovement began in the 2000s and accelerated in the 2010s: the mechanical keyboard revival. Gamers and professional typists rediscovered the tactile and auditory feedback of mechanical switches and began building a dedicated enthusiast community around keyboard hardware. Custom keyboards, boutique switch manufacturers, and group buys for limited-edition keycaps became a significant niche market.

Laptop keyboards introduced yet another paradigm: chiclet-style low-travel keys optimized for thinness over feel. Mobile devices replaced physical keyboards with touchscreens and autocorrect, creating a typing experience radically different from desktop typing. Despite these variations, the fundamental skill of keyboard typing has remained the dominant input method for serious computer work.

Modern Online Typing Tests

The internet democratized typing assessment. Before online typing tests, measuring your WPM required specialized software, a timed typing exam, or access to a professional testing center. The early 2000s saw the first web-based typing tests that anyone could access for free.

TypeRacer (2008) added a competitive element — racing against other users in real time — and introduced typing practice as an online multiplayer activity. 10FastFingers, Keybr, and Monkeytype followed with different design philosophies: minimalism, adaptive difficulty, and community features. The category evolved from simple benchmark tools to platforms that support structured typing practice.

Today, millions of people use free online typing tests to measure their WPM, track improvement over time, and compete on global leaderboards. Apex Skills continues in this tradition — a clean, distraction-free typing speed test designed for people who want honest metrics without noise.

The Future of Typing

Voice input has improved dramatically with modern speech recognition systems, and it handles some tasks — dictating messages, hands-free commands — better than keyboard typing. But voice has not replaced typing for the core workflows of knowledge workers: programming, writing, email composition, data entry, and research. The keyboard remains faster, quieter, more private, and more precise for text-based tasks.

AI-assisted writing tools are a more interesting development. Large language models can draft text, complete sentences, and suggest edits — but they require a skilled human to direct, review, and refine their output. Fast, accurate typing is still the primary input method for working with AI tools effectively. If anything, the value of high-quality typing has increased as the pace of knowledge work accelerates.

The physical keyboard itself continues to evolve. Projection keyboards, haptic feedback surfaces, and split ergonomic layouts are all active areas of development. Some researchers are exploring brain-computer interfaces as a long-term alternative to physical input. But the keyboard as we know it — physical keys, QWERTY layout, tactile feedback — is likely to remain the standard for professional computing for the foreseeable future.

Competitive typing has also grown as a hobby. Online communities around speed typing, custom keyboards, and layout optimization attract serious practitioners who push the boundaries of what is achievable on a standard keyboard. World records continue to be broken — the current verified record exceeds 200 WPM — and the techniques used by these elite typists are increasingly well-documented and accessible to motivated beginners.