美式键盘 QWERTY 布局的来历

注：机翻，未校对。

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The QWERTY Keyboard Is Tech’s Biggest Unsolved Mystery

QWERTY 键盘是科技界最大的未解之谜

It’s on your computer keyboard and your smartphone screen: QWERTY, the first six letters of the top row of the standard keyboard layout. But no one knows how it originated, and the puzzle has been frustrating historians for over a century. Will we ever figure it out?
它位于您的计算机键盘和智能手机屏幕上：QWERTY，标准键盘布局顶行的前六个字母。但没有人知道它是如何起源的，一个多世纪以来，这个谜题一直困扰着历史学家。我们能弄清楚吗？

Dead Men’s Secrets 被遗忘的秘密

Almost 150 years ago, the typewriter transformed the workplace just as dramatically as the personal computer did in the late 20th century. Since then, through path dependence, we’ve been stuck with QWERTY, an odd layout once called the “universal keyboard.” The QWERTYUIOP arrangement lives on billions of devices both analog and electronic around the world.
大约 150 年前，打字机改变了工作场所，就像 20 世纪末的个人电脑一样。从那时起，由于路径依赖，我们一直被困在 QWERTY 上，这是一种曾经被称为 “通用键盘” 的奇怪布局。QWERTYUIOP 安排存在于全球数十亿台模拟和电子设备上。

Benj Edwards / How-To Geek

The weirdest thing about the evolution of the QWERTY keyboard layout is that no one knows for certain why the layout took the shape it did. It’s a genuine mystery, despite many seemingly authoritative sources writing to the contrary. In a comprehensive 1983 paper titled The QWERTY Keyboard: A Review, Jan Noyes wrote, “There appears … to be no obvious reason for the placement of letters in the QWERTY layout, and doubts concerning its origin still remain.”
QWERTY 键盘布局演变最奇怪的事情是，没有人确切知道为什么布局会变成现在这样。这是一个真正的谜，尽管许多看似权威的消息来源写道相反。在 1983 年一篇题为 QWERTY 键盘：评论的综合论文中，Jan Noyes 写道：“似乎… 在 QWERTY 布局中放置字母的明显原因并不明显，对其起源的疑问仍然存在。

We know who created the QWERTY layout and when it debuted, but the exact meaning behind most of the letter positions within the layout itself has been lost to history. None of the keyboard’s inventors left a record explaining the layout before they died. “The origin is obscure and the historians disagree,” wrote Roy T. Griffith in 1949. As a result, it’s been the subject of frequent speculation for the past 100 years. Here’s what we do know about it.
我们知道是谁创造了 QWERTY 布局以及它何时首次亮相，但布局本身中大多数字母位置背后的确切含义已经消失在历史中。键盘的发明者在去世前都没有留下解释布局的记录。“起源不明，历史学家不同意，” 罗伊・T・格里菲斯（Roy T. Griffith）在 1949 年写道。因此，在过去的 100 年里，它一直是人们频繁猜测的主题。以下是我们所知道的。

The Story of QWERTY as We Understand It 我们所理解的 QWERTY 的故事

The road to QWERTY began around 1867 when a Milwaukee-based newspaper publisher and inventor named Christopher Latham Sholes began working on a typing machine with the help of Carlos Glidden, Matthias Schwalbach, and Samuel W. Soulé.
QWERTY 的道路始于 1867 年左右，当时一位名叫克里斯托弗・莱瑟姆・肖尔斯 （Christopher Latham Sholes） 的密尔沃基报纸出版商和发明家在卡洛斯・格利登 （Carlos Glidden）、马蒂亚斯・施瓦尔巴赫 （Matthias Schwalbach） 和塞缪尔・苏莱 （Samuel W. Soulé） 的帮助下开始研究打字机。

Sholes wasn’t the very first person to create a typewriter, but his innovations lead to the first successful commercial typewriter model in 1874, the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, commercialized with the help of businessman James Densmore.
肖尔斯并不是第一个创造打字机的人，但他的创新导致了 1874 年第一款成功的商用打字机型号，即肖尔斯和格利登打字机，在商人詹姆斯・登斯莫尔的帮助下商业化。

Prior to that, Sholes’ first typewriter prototype (circa 1868), included a keyboard that looked much like a piano’s keys, with a nearly alphabetical arrangement. In 1870-1871, with the help of Matthias Schwalbach, the piano keyboard on the next prototype became four rows of push-button keys, but the keyboard still retained a nearly alphabetical arrangement.
在此之前，肖尔斯的第一台打字机原型（约 1868 年）包括一个看起来很像钢琴键的键盘，几乎是按字母顺序排列的。1870-1871 年，在马蒂亚斯・施瓦尔巴赫（Matthias Schwalbach）的帮助下，下一个原型上的钢琴键盘变成了四排按钮键，但键盘仍然保留了几乎按字母顺序排列的排列方式。

National Museum of American History (Public Domain)

What happened next is shrouded in mystery, as there are no surviving records that describe what took place. “It is positively known that Densmore and Sholes, laboring together, worked out the