This site gathers, commemorates and shares the history of how modern people write, which is to say, by typing on a certain kind of keyboard invented in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1873. The history of the QWERTY keyboard is well known to a modest number of historians, curators and collectors, but too little known by the billions of people world-wide who still depend on it to this day. There are few other artifacts of the Victorian era still in use in something close their original form, and none used so widely.

But every history starts with the recognition that it didn't have to be this way. There was nothing natural or inevitable about QWERTY, no single reason why it took the form it did, and no easy explanation for why it has flourished for so long. This archive of QWERTY materials includes a wide range of historical artifacts and contemporary reflections, ranging from digitized documents from the original inventors to oral histories with modern typists. It also maps locations in Milwaukee where the inventors lived and worked, and one day we hope it will map the spread of QWERTY around the globe. 

This archive began as a collaborative project in a graduate seminar in the Department of English of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, English 885: Humanities for the Public Good. The students and the instructor worked together to shape the project, create and gather materials, interpret some of them, and pass it on to others in the future. This is a living archive that we hope will grow and develop over the years ahead. We welcome your suggestions, items for inclusion, or ideas for improvement. 

Project Director

Jason Puskar, Professor of English
puskar@uwm.edu

Project Team

Amber Chavez
Wren Dalton
Pratiti Ketoki
Rachel La Due
Camilla Lee
Anushmita Mohanty
Frank O'Neal
Ipsa Samaddar
Colleen Tierney
Blessing Uwisike
Ryan Vojtisek
Rachel Zembrowski

Collaborators

UWM College of Letters and Science
UWM Libraries
QWERTYFest MKE