The Reason Your Keyboard Is Laid Out in QWERTY (and Why It Stuck)

Look down at your keyboard. The top row starts with Q-W-E-R-T-Y.

But… why? Why not A-B-C-D-E-F? Wouldn’t that make more sense?

The answer goes back to the 1800s, and the story is stranger than you might think.

The Birth of QWERTY

The QWERTY layout was invented by Christopher Latham Sholes, the man behind one of the first commercial typewriters in the 1870s.

Back then, typewriters had metal arms (called “typebars”) that swung up to strike the page. If two neighboring keys were pressed too quickly in succession, the arms would jam together.

Sholes needed a fix.

The “Anti-Speed” Design

Contrary to what you’d expect, QWERTY wasn’t designed to make typing faster—it was designed to slow typists down just enough to prevent jams.

• Commonly used letters (like “T” and “H”) were spaced apart.

• Frequently paired letters were separated so they wouldn’t clash.

• The result? Fewer jams, smoother typing.

It was a mechanical solution to a mechanical problem.

Why Did It Stick?

By the time typewriter technology improved and jamming was less of an issue, QWERTY had already become the standard.

• Typists had trained on it.

• Schools were teaching it.

• Businesses were hiring based on it.

Switching to a new layout (like the more efficient Dvorak keyboard) would mean retraining millions of people. Inertia won.

The Alternatives We Never Adopted

• Dvorak Layout (1930s): Faster and more ergonomic, but never caught on.

• Colemak (2000s): A modern redesign, popular with programmers but still niche.

Despite these challengers, QWERTY holds its throne—proof that sometimes the first solution, even if imperfect, becomes the permanent one.

Final Thought

The QWERTY keyboard isn’t the most efficient design. It wasn’t meant to be.

It was a hack—an ingenious workaround for clunky 19th-century machines.

And yet, here we are in 2025, typing emails, code, and texts on a layout built to solve a problem that hasn’t existed for a century.

Sometimes, history doesn’t just influence technology—it locks it in place.