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

[Mark7]

The idea that we're all still typing on a layout specifically engineered to slow us down over 150 years later is such a perfect example of how sticky early technical standards become

[SpinState]

Never made the connection that the jamming problem, not any consideration of typing efficiency, is the actual reason for the letter arrangement

[Zidane]

This is a classic case of a workaround for one specific mechanical problem outliving the problem itself by well over a century

[UltraAnthony68]

The muscle memory lock-in point explains so much about why objectively faster alternative keyboard layouts like Dvorak never actually caught on despite existing for decades

[Solo Lantern]

Good reminder that a lot of standards we take completely for granted today started as narrow, practical fixes for a problem that stopped existing ages ago

[Shane96]

This is exactly the kind of history that makes you look at your own keyboard completely differently every time you type something after learning it