We were talking this week about how weird it is that every keyboard we've ever touched — phone, laptop, the ancient Dell in the corner of the office — uses the same layout. QWERTY. Named after the top-left row. Designed in the 1870s for a machine none of us have seen outside a museum.
The common story is that Christopher Latham Sholes designed QWERTY in 1874 to slow typists down so the mechanical arms of his typewriter wouldn't jam. That's half true. The real goal was smarter than that. Sholes rearranged the keys so that letters commonly typed in sequence (like T and H) were placed far apart on the type-bar basket. That way the arms swung from opposite sides and didn't collide mid-strike. It wasn't about slowing fingers. It was about staggering the mechanical timing. A side effect is that your left hand does about 56% of the work on English text, which is a little rude to right-handed people but here we are.
In 1936, August Dvorak patented a layout that put the most common English letters on the home row. Studies at the time (some of them run by Dvorak himself, which, fair) claimed typists were faster and had less fatigue. The Navy even ran a test in the 1940s suggesting retraining costs would pay back in ten days. And then... nothing happened. Millions of QWERTY typewriters already existed. Millions of people already knew where the keys were. Retraining every typist in America to save a few seconds a page was a hard sell. Dvorak lives on as an option buried three menus deep in your operating system, used by a small and very opinionated group of people who will tell you about it unprompted.
QWERTY is the textbook example of what economists call path dependence. The layout stuck around not because it's the best, but because everyone already knew it, every machine already had it, and switching costs more than staying. Phones could have used any layout when touchscreens arrived in the late 2000s. They picked QWERTY. Voice-to-text could sidestep the whole question. It mostly hasn't. We are, all of us, still typing on a keyboard optimized for a mechanical problem that stopped existing sometime around when your grandparents were born. The next time your pinky reaches for the Q, know that you're participating in a 150-year-old workaround for jammed type-bars.
If you know a weird-origin story we should write about next Friday, send it our way. We collect these like other people collect stamps.
— Alexander & Amanda @ SBATC
