Look down at a keyboard. The top row of letters spells out Q-W-E-R-T-Y, and the rest of the layout makes no sense at all. Why? It’s because of a problem that hasn’t existed in over a century.
Early mechanical typewriters in the 1870s had metal arms that swung up to strike the page. If two arms next to each other moved at the same instant they’d jam together. So the inventor, Christopher Sholes, scrambled the letters so common pairs (like T and H) sat far apart on the keyboard. Fewer jams. As a bonus, all the letters in TYPEWRITER fit on the top row, which made the layout easy to demo to customers.
Modern keyboards don’t have any swinging arms. People have invented faster, more sensible layouts like Dvorak. But because everyone already learned QWERTY, no one wants to switch. So we are stuck with a fix for a problem that vanished long ago.
