The QWERTY keyboard layout may have been designed partly to slow typists down before typewriters jammed themselves apart

The challenge in developing the first typewriter prototypes by Christopher Latham Sholes in the late 1860s and early 1870s wasn’t teaching people to type at high speed. Rather, the issue lay in ensuring the device did not destroy itself due to jams as typing speeds became excessively fast. Early typewriters used metal type bars that would swing upward individually when struck, striking the ink ribbon before touching paper. However, the neighboring metal bars tended to collide, jam together, or become stuck in the typewriter when certain frequently combined letters were typed very quickly one after another. Eventually, Sholes and his colleagues began to realize that even the arrangement of keys themselves could affect the frequency of these collisions.

It was important to realize that the keyboard was not initially designed based on any notion of efficiency in a digital context or ease of use; rather, it resulted from constraints imposed by machines of the time. As Britannica explains, Sholes came up with the QWERTY design in his work on developing commercial typewriters of that era, along with gunsmith and machinist Carlos Glidden’s help. What made this relevant was that the typewriter itself had not yet fully developed its mechanical design at the time.

The layout separated common letter combinations to reduce collisions

The theory that seems to carry the most weight in explaining why the letters on a keyboard are arranged as they are is that Sholes deliberately arranged them to prevent the typebars from colliding too soon when struck by one another. As reported by MIT Technology Review, the reason for the layout was probably based on many experiments that involved the mechanical workings of typewriters instead of any theoretical linguistic analysis. This will become clear when the inner workings of an old typewriter are considered: with every keystroke, a small metal lever would strike the paper.


As such, QWERTY was a balance between language and mechanical capabilities. Historians disagree about whether QWERTY was designed to slow typists, although most agree that the arrangement of the letter keys was intended to avoid mechanical interference. However, ease of use was more important than the fastest typing possible because a jammed machine could mean no typing at all. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the widespread acceptance of the keyboard design was largely due to the commercial success of Remington, which marketed Sholes' invention. This commercial success was significant from a historical perspective, as keyboard arrangements create behavioral patterns that make changing them hard, even when superior alternatives emerge.

A nineteenth-century mechanical compromise survived into the digital age

Another reason the QWERTY narrative remains interesting is that the mechanical problem that originally defined the keyboard layout has long been obsolete. There were no further physical mechanisms involved in the introduction of digital technologies, such as collisions between swing-type bars inside machines. However, the keyboard still existed because it had reached a certain level of saturation among its users. According to research on typographic layouts published on JSTOR Daily, the QWERTY layout remained successful even after newer layouts, such as the Dvorak layout, were introduced, despite being more efficient. This demonstrates an important aspect of technology history.

The human body was forced to adapt itself to the existing keyboard rather than completely reinventing it. Even more ironic is the thing that makes the entire story fascinating to the reader. It may be said that one of the most recognizable interfaces in the modern computer world owes some of its structure to the limitations of nineteenth-century metal technology. The inventor was not concerned about the future laptop, mobile phone, or digital message he would leave for future generations of users; he only sought ways to prevent the metal arms of his typewriter from tangling. However, that solution turned out to become too popular to be changed during subsequent technological advances and eventually got its place among other types of keyboards in computerized gadgets.