Your keyboard's layout was shaped by a telegraph, not a typewriter jam
The popular story says QWERTY was designed to slow typists down. Historians who checked the patents found a more boring, more telling explanation.
The layout of every keyboard you have ever used traces back to Christopher Latham Sholes, a Wisconsin printer who spent the early 1870s failing to build a usable typewriter. His first prototype arranged the keys alphabetically, in two rows, like a piano. It kept jamming.
The popular fix-it story says Sholes deliberately scattered common letter pairs apart from each other to slow typists down, so the mechanical arms wouldn't collide. It's a satisfying story — modern technology hobbled on purpose by its own designer — and it is not what the historical record actually supports. Researchers who traced the patents and Sholes's correspondence found the layout evolving instead through feedback from telegraph operators transcribing Morse code, who wanted certain frequent letter pairs — like E and R — positioned for their own habits, not spread apart at all.
Whatever produced it, QWERTY stuck. When more efficient alternatives arrived, including the Dvorak layout in the 1930s, they never displaced it — not because they failed on merit, but because millions of trained typists, existing typewriters, and eventually computer factories were already built around QWERTY. Switching stopped being a design decision and became a coordination problem nobody could solve alone.
The keyboard under your fingers right now isn't the best possible layout. It's just the first one that got enough people to agree to it before anyone had a reason to disagree.