A long-lived rumor is that typewriter
inventor Christopher Sholes arranged the letters in the QWERTY layout to
slow down the typist.
If this were true, he would have located popular
letters such as "A" and "S" at the far corners of the keyboard and
located unpopular letters like "Q", "Z", and "X" under your
fingertips, right where you don't need them. Looking at the PC (QWERTY) keyboard
shows us that, in fact, the opposite is true.
What really happened was Mr. Sholes varied from
his original alphabetic layout* when he placed commonly used pairs of letters such as "sh",
"ck", "th", "pr", etc. on alternating sides of the keyboard
to reduce jamming of the typewriter's swing-arms.
This design change actually had the bonus effect
of speeding up typing by letting the user alternate hands more often - think drum roll.
A 1953 U.S.
General Services Administration study of the QWERTY keyboard and it's only serious
challenger, the DVORAK keyboard, found no appreciable typing speed difference between the
two keyboards. Fingers travel
less distance on the DVORAK layout, but additional alternating-hand keystrokes speed up
the QWERTY layout. The result - a draw.
The fact is, QWERTY works and it works quite
well.
* You can see remnants of Mr. Sholes
original alphabetic layout in the QWERTY layout, namely the keys "FGHJKL".
