Why is your keyboard laid out so strangely?
QWERTY was developed in the 1870s for Christopher Latham Sholes's typewriter. The popular story says it was designed to slow typists and stop keys jamming. The truth is murkier, but one thing is clear: once millions learned it, the layout became almost impossible to change.
Christopher Latham Sholes, a Milwaukee newspaper editor, developed one of the first commercially successful typewriters with Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule. Over several years he rearranged the keys, and by the time the Sholes and Glidden typewriter was sold by E. Remington and Sons in 1874, the top row began with QWERTY.
The famous explanation is that Sholes arranged the letters to separate common pairs, so that neighbouring typebars would not clash and jam when struck quickly. There is some truth to the idea that mechanics shaped the layout, but historians dispute the details. One study by Japanese researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka argued the layout was shaped by the needs of telegraph operators transcribing Morse code.
What happened next is less disputed. Remington's typewriters became dominant, typing schools taught QWERTY, and employers hired typists who knew it. By the time alternatives appeared, notably August Dvorak's layout, patented in 1936 and claimed to be faster, QWERTY was entrenched. Evidence on whether Dvorak is truly faster is mixed and contested.
Economists often use QWERTY as an example of 'path dependence' or 'lock-in': an early, perhaps arbitrary choice becomes permanent because switching would require everyone to change at once. The typewriter's mechanics are long gone, yet the arrangement lives on under our thumbs, on screens that could show any layout at all.
Source: Wikipedia — QWERTY · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
