Look at your keyboard: Q W E R T Y. No alphabetical order, no obvious logic. The layout is about 150 years old and was designed for machines that no longer exist.
The typewriter
Christopher Latham Sholes and his partners developed one of the first commercially successful typewriters in the United States in the late 1860s and 1870s. Early machines used metal bars that swung up to strike the paper. Type quickly with neighbouring letters and the bars could clash and jam.
Shuffling the letters
Over several years the layout was rearranged — partly, historians argue, to separate common letter pairs and reduce jams, and partly based on feedback from telegraph operators who transcribed Morse code and wanted certain letters in convenient places. By the time the Remington company manufactured the machine in 1874, the layout was close to the QWERTY we use today.
Why we never switched
Other layouts have been designed for speed and comfort — the best known is the Dvorak layout from the 1930s. But by then millions of typists had learned QWERTY, and every typewriter, school and office used it. Switching would cost more than any gain. Economists use QWERTY as the classic example of “lock-in”: an early choice that sticks because everyone already uses it.
Bonus wacky bits
- You can type “typewriter” using only the top row of letters.
- Many European countries use variants: AZERTY in France, QWERTZ in Germany.
- On phones there are no jamming bars at all — and we still use QWERTY.
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