Talk:QWERTY/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Patented and sold?

The lede currently contains this:
"The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to E. Remington and Sons in 1873."

That phrasing seemed a little off to me, so I started digging. Similar phrasing was originally added here:
"The QWERTY design was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868, and sold to Remington in 1873, when it first appeared in typewriters."

While there are some of what I would describe as shallow sources claiming the keyboard layout or design got patented and sold, none of what I would describe as deep sources would seem to concur.

Where sources disagree, or only some sources say something, and without themselves citing proof, that is a mess to be sorted out. If that yields an edit war, someone will probably accuse the other side of original research, and I guess whoever first lobs that hold hand grenade will win – or maybe the hand grenade will prove someone's own petard, and see them hoist by it. Who knows?

In any event, Sholes' most famous patent, no. 207,559, apparently the first typewriter patent a picture of the QWERTY layout appeared in, does NOT in fact make any claim to the QWERTY layout. While its Figure 3 depicts a QWERTY layout, no reference to that is made in the all-important list of claims at the bottom; the layout's design is incidental, and treated as incidental, and rightly so: The idea of design patents was not recognised, much less formalised at the time. (While Wikipedia's design patent article lists some older patents as examples of design patents granted way back, those are rare exceptions, granted before the idea of the patentability of designs was litigated and took root in the US – and it's not taken root worldwide.) So this claim that QWERTY was patented is an anachronism. Even if, hypothetically, Sholes had made a claim, or filed for and oddly and exceptionally been granted a patent on QWERTY, it's highly dubious that would have been enforceable and stood up to a challenge at the time, before US courts started generally recognising design patents. But he didn't make a claim, or file for a patent on QWERTY, and the claim that QWERTY was sold is wholly without merit. There's no evidence for it. Not for the QWERTY layout being sold. There is evidence of other manufacturers adopting or at least optionally offering the QWERTY layout for their own typewriters too. There is no evidence of their being challenged by Sholes. Not over the QWERTY layout. Sholes only ever had the mechanisms of his typewriters patented – not any of their keyboard layouts. What Sholes sold to Remington was the patent for a typewriter mechanism – not the keyboard layout incidental thereto.

In light of the fact that the originally uncited origin edit of that claim of a patented and sold QWERTY layout is almost twenty-two years old, I also think the odds are high those shallow sources are ultimately circular (though I have not looked at each one).

—ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 07:00, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

PS: If you're looking for a patented layout, try Dvorak. I'm not sure if that was the first time a keyboard layout got patented, but it definitely did get patented, and with not a claim on any keyboard mechanism anywhere in sight. I suspect that wasn't the last time either. I suppose the Dvorak patent is long-expired now, but that doesn't even matter, because its layout never got widely adopted. I wonder why. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 08:09, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that is a clear explanation that better fits US law at the time. I have just tweaked your wording a little more, changing

• The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter sold to E. Remington and Sons in 1873.

to

• The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter sold to E. Remington and Sons in 1873.

May I propose a further tweak that I hesitated to make as maybe it needs an explict citation? :

• The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the patent for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter sold to E. Remington and Sons in 1873.
  • The QWERTY design is based on a layout included in the Sholes and Glidden typewriter patent sold to E. Remington and Sons in 1873. might be better. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 11:37, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

Apart from the citation issue, there is a risk in that wording that it may cause readers to infer that the layout design was anything more than incidental to the patent, which is the misunderstanding that we are trying to fix. (US law is peculiar. Everywhere else relies on the law of copyright to protect designs.) Comments? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 11:11, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

I understand your hesitation. I too was a teeny bit queasy – before I got bold and deleted that "and". To be totally frank, my edit summary there, and perhaps some of the above, project a confidence I can't, in the final analysis, technically fully back up, because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Could there still be yet another Sholes patent, on the QWERTY layout, and a bill of sale to match, which I just haven't seen? I highly doubt it, but it's not technically impossible. (The USPTO should be able to have the last word on that.) The origin edit was oddly specific, but also highly suspiciously inconsistent with what I could establish, so I think it was mistaken at best. The only 1868 Sholes patent I could find (#79,265) shows a much more inchoate type-writer[sic] invention than the 1878 patent (#207,559), in a declaration document whose confidence wrote a lot of cheques Sholes' early design couldn't cash: "Thus made, the type-writer is the simplest, most perfectly adapted to its work—the writing of ordinary communications with types instead of a pen—and in every way the best of all machines yet designed for the purpose, particularly as to the cost of making the machine and the neatness and labor-saving quality of its work." This for a machine with a piano-style keyboard and of course nothing about QWERTY. I haven't seen an actual bill of sale, but I suspect it was Sholes' subsequent (ultimately also patented?) refinements that got Remington interested. The 1873 contract with Remington via Densmore wasn't about the 1868 design, and not about QWERTY according to anything and all that I could find. Of course, an alternative to getting to the bottom of this here might be to just strip out the "sold to Remington" part and leave that for someone else to sort out yonder. But until there's some kind of final consensus, it's all a little bit unsatisfactory, and of course speaking metaphorically and saying "typewriter sold" is possibly even less clear than "typewriter rights sold", which is what we're suggesting – but a citable bill of sale or superior and non-circular source would be really nice. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 14:46, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

PS: I have found yet another Sholes typewriter patent, but it doesn't help us answer any of the open questions here. It (#568,630) is from 1896 and again is a patent on aspects of a typewriter mechanism. It also incidentally shows a layout, a new one, not QWERTY, but it again makes no claims on that actual layout. That however did not stop this site —which is cited from the Christopher Latham Sholes article— from falsely claiming Sholes had been granted "a patent on an improved keyboard arrangement". That's pretty assuredly as false for the latter layout as it is for QWERTY. It's really odd how these same kinds of false claims keep cropping up. Why is that, I wonder?

"ASDFGH" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect ASDFGH has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2023 March 4 § ASDFGH until a consensus is reached. An anonymous username, not my real name 23:56, 4 March 2023 (UTC)

I may be late to the party here, but since those linked discussions are closed, I'll just note for the record here, I don't think there's any issue with keeping that, and I think a "delete by default" attitude is a problem, particularly when the content is at least marginally useful. Someone might see ASDFGH somewhere, not recognise it, look it up here and realise ah, so that's where that's from. That's useful. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 17:10, 16 January 2024 (UTC)

False precision?

The article's History section currently has this:

The modern layout is:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 - =
Q W E R T Y U I O P [ ] \
A S D F G H J K L ; '
Z X C V B N M , . /

I'm not sure it is wise to include all that punctuation there, because that's highly specific to the US-QWERTY layout and ANSI keyboard design, and the \ in particular is not found in that position e.g. on (UK and similar) ISO QWERTY keyboards. Perhaps that part of the article would be better served by a common denominator layout subset of all (globally) widely available QWERTY keyboards. —ReadOnlyAccount (talk) 21:34, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

this seems relevant

• On the prehistory of QWERTY

50.245.17.105 (talk) 14:06, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

That paper is already cited seven times in the article, as footnote [2]. But ReadOnlyAccount's question is about "the modern layout", which well outside its scope.

But the caption should have said which of the many modern layouts, so I have just now corrected it. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 15:30, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

"Qwertqwert" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Qwertqwert has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 April 11 § Qwertqwert until a consensus is reached. 🇺🇲JayCubby✡ please edit my user page! Talk 17:03, 11 April 2024 (UTC)