DID YOU KNOW…
Why Your QWERTY Keyboard Was Designed to Slow You Down
The familiar QWERTY keyboard layout, ubiquitous on computers and smartphones, was originally designed in the 1870s not for speed, but to deliberately slow typists down to prevent mechanical typewriters from jamming.
Early mechanical typewriters suffered from issues where frequently used adjacent keys would clash and stick if typed too quickly. To address this, inventor Christopher Latham Sholes rearranged the alphabet, separating common letter pairs like "th" and "st" to reduce the likelihood of such jams. While more ergonomically efficient layouts have been proposed since, QWERTY's early adoption by typing schools and its prevalence in business offices solidified its dominance, making it a challenging standard to dislodge despite its inherent inefficiencies for modern digital typing.
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