The QWERTY keyboard was actually designed to make typing slower, not faster

[Slow Hollow]

Christopher Latham Sholes patented the first commercially successful mechanical typewriter in 1873, but his original design had a serious mechanical flaw, the metal typebars connected to frequently used letter pairs kept physically jamming into each other when typists worked quickly.

Rather than redesign the mechanism itself, Sholes rearranged the letters on the keyboard specifically to separate commonly paired letters from each other, deliberately slowing typists down just enough to reduce how often the typebars collided and jammed. The resulting layout, named for the first six letters in its top row, stuck.

By the time typewriter mechanics improved enough that jamming stopped being a real concern, QWERTY had already become the entrenched industry standard, and generations of typists had already built muscle memory around it, making it far easier to keep the layout than to retrain an entire workforce onto something objectively better designed for speed.

Why are keyboards QWERTY and not ABCDEF?theburner.substack.com