Special Lecture: “150 Years of the QWERTY Keyboard”
Saturday, April 15, 2023 at 11:30 a.m. & 1:30 p.m. in Milwaukee Public Museum, Ground Floor Garden Galleries
Arguably Milwaukee’s most famous export, the QWERTY keyboard is named after the arrangement of letters on the first commercially successful typewriter, which went into production in 1873. Typewriters are mostly obsolete today, but their keyboards are not. Billions of people still type using the same layout of keys, a quaint Victorian relic at the heart of even the most advanced computer. Why has QWERTY been so durable, and where did it come from?