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QWERTY wasn't built to slow you down
💡 QWERTY was designed to stop mechanical typebars from clashing, not to slow typists down — and it survived through momentum, not superiority.
Almost everyone "knows" the story: the QWERTY keyboard scrambles the alphabet on purpose to slow typists down, because fast typing jammed early machines. It's a tidy tale — and it's mostly wrong.
The layout was hammered out in the 1870s by newspaperman Christopher Latham Sholes for the first commercial typewriter, sold by Remington in 1874. On those machines, each key swung a metal typebar up to strike the paper. If two neighboring bars fired in quick succession, they clashed and jammed. So Sholes spread apart letters that frequently appear together in English — the goal wasn't slower fingers but fewer collisions between adjacent bars.
There's a twist historians point to: some clustering (like the row of letters spelling "typewriter") and early tweaks came partly from telegraph operators, an important early customer group, transcribing Morse code. QWERTY won not because it was the fastest possible arrangement, but because Remington's machines sold, typing schools taught it, and switching costs locked it in — a classic case of the first standard becoming the standard.
So the keyboard under your hands is a fossil of 1870s mechanics, kept alive by habit long after the jamming problem vanished.