Before QWERTY
The early typing machines of the Sholes group, built in Milwaukee in the late 1860s, are described as having keys laid out in alphabetical order on a keyboard resembling a piano’s. An alphabetical order is easy to learn at first, and it is not obviously a bad idea. Over a few years of experiments and feedback, the layout was rearranged, and by the time Remington began manufacturing the machine in 1873 to 1874, the main body of the arrangement we know as QWERTY, named for the first six letters of the top row, was in place.
The first machines printed only capital letters. A shift key that let one set of type bars print both upper and lower case was a later development, introduced on Remington’s Model 2 in 1878.
The jamming explanation
The most common explanation is that the layout was designed to prevent jams. In typewriters with typebars that swing up to strike the paper, bars for letters pressed in quick succession could collide if they were close together. Separating common letter pairs was supposed to reduce this problem.
The explanation is plausible and widely repeated, but not fully documented. The Sholes team did struggle with jamming, and it makes sense that the rearrangement was in part a response to it. But the idea that the designers sought to slow typists down is more of a legend. No clear record shows that the creators were aiming at a specific slower speed, and the rearrangement was part of an incremental process.
Other theories
Some researchers have proposed other explanations. One argues that the layout was influenced by the needs of telegraph operators who translated Morse code messages by ear, since Morse operators were an early customer group and would have wanted certain letters easy to reach. A study published in the 2000s by Japanese researchers, Koichi Yasuoka and Yushi Koyama, argued for this view. Their reading is based on the evolution of Sholes’s early prototypes, but it too relies on circumstantial evidence, and other historians remain cautious.
Another commonly told detail is that the letters of the word “typewriter” all lie in the top row, which supposedly helped salespeople demonstrate the machine quickly. This is a well-known observation about the layout, and it is likely that the placement was at least convenient for that purpose. Whether it was intentional is unknown.
The reasonable conclusion is that QWERTY probably reflects several pressures at once: mechanics, ease of demonstration, the preferences of testers, and chance.
Alternatives and national variants
In 1936, August Dvorak and William Dealey patented a simplified layout that places the most common letters on the home row. Supporters claim it is faster and more comfortable. Later analysis has been mixed. Some economists, including Stan Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis, have argued that early tests promoting Dvorak had flaws and that clear evidence of a large advantage is lacking. Researchers still disagree, and most typists have simply never had a reason to switch.
Several countries use close variants of QWERTY. The French AZERTY and the German QWERTZ are examples, adjusted for local letters. Many other languages use customized layouts based on the same keyboard.
From mechanical to electric to electronic
Keyboard hardware changed far more than the layout.
Mechanical keys. On manual typewriters, each key was a lever connected by a linkage to a typebar. Pressing harder or faster directly affected the print.
Electric machines. Motor-driven machines, such as the IBM Selectric introduced in 1961, made the keys light triggers. Because no long bar was thrown at the paper, there was no concern about collisions between bars, though the layout stayed the same. Related machines like the teleprinter used the same arrangement, and it became the standard for text input on early terminals attached to electronic computers.
Electronic keyboards. From the 1970s and 1980s, keys became switches sending signals to a chip. Designs included mechanical switches, rubber domes and thin membrane sheets. Extra keys appeared for computing needs, such as function keys, an arrow cluster, a control key and the numeric keypad. The shift key and carriage return remain in the names of keys long after carriages left.
Screens. On touchscreen interfaces, QWERTY was carried onto glass. The design of early smartphones, including thumb keyboards and then on-screen keys, largely kept the layout because users already knew it, even though the original reasons for it no longer applied.
Why it stuck
The layout persisted for reasons that economists call lock-in. By the 1890s, typists and typing teachers had trained on Remington-style machines, and the number of trained typists encouraged manufacturers to follow the same arrangement. Once a very large number of people had learned one arrangement, the cost of changing exceeded any likely benefit for most. This explains its survival better than any claim that it is the best possible design.