Why is the keyboard laid out QWERTY?

The first six letters of the top row of your keyboard spell QWERTY, and the arrangement has not changed in a meaningful way since 1878. It is one of the oldest interface conventions still in daily use, and nobody would design it that way today.

Where it came from

Christopher Latham Sholes and his collaborators built the first commercially successful typewriter in Milwaukee in the early 1870s. Early prototypes arranged the keys alphabetically. The problem was mechanical: the type bars that swung up to strike the paper jammed when two neighbouring letters were struck in quick succession.

The layout was rearranged, repeatedly, to reduce jams. The popular story is that common pairs of letters were deliberately placed far apart to slow typists down. The evidence is thinner than the story; a more careful reading is that the arrangement was tuned to keep frequently paired type bars from colliding, which happens to spread some common pairs across the keyboard and cluster others. Either way, the goal was the machine, not the hand.

Remington bought the design in 1873 and shipped it on the Sholes and Glidden typewriter. By the 1890s, typing schools taught QWERTY, typists trained on it, employers bought machines that matched the typists, and the layout became fixed by the size of the installed base.

Why it stuck

Once a few hundred thousand people can type on one arrangement, changing it costs more than any efficiency gain saves. Every alternative layout since has run into this. It is not that QWERTY is good; it is that everyone already knows it, every keyboard ships with it, and every shared computer expects it.

The alternatives

Dvorak (1936) puts the most common letters on the home row and alternates hands for most common pairs. Colemak (2006) keeps most of QWERTY's punctuation and shortcut keys in place while moving the letters to reduce finger travel. Both measurably reduce how far fingers move over a page of English.

Do they make you faster? A little, once you are fluent, and the fastest typists in the world are split across layouts. The gain is smaller than the gain from learning to touch type at all, and switching costs a month or two of being slower than you were. If you type on other people's machines, or use software whose shortcuts assume QWERTY, the switch costs more.

What matters more than the layout

Learning the layout you have. A touch typist at 80 wpm on QWERTY has already captured almost all of the speed available; the layout accounts for a few percent at the margin. Most of the remaining slowness is in specific keys and key pairs, which is a matter of aimed practice rather than of moving the letters around.

Common questions

Was QWERTY designed to slow typists down?

Not as a goal. It was arranged to stop the type bars of early typewriters jamming, which involved separating some letters that were often struck together. Slowing the typist was a side effect, not the intention.

Is Dvorak faster than QWERTY?

Somewhat, for a fluent Dvorak typist, mainly through less finger travel. The difference is small compared with the difference between touch typing and not, and switching costs weeks of reduced speed.

Should I switch to Colemak?

Only if you type almost exclusively on your own machines and are willing to be slower for a month or two. For most people, learning to touch type well on QWERTY is the better use of the same effort.