This Is Why The Letters On A Keyboard Are Not Arranged Alphabetically

What led to QWERTY?

…is one question that has perplexed even the smartest of minds. Why did the progenitors of modern day computing adopt this arrangement of alphabets that was prominent during the time of the typewriters? Wouldn’t life have been much simpler with an alphabetic order layout?

Well, here’s how it all started:

A man named Christopher Sholes designed the QWERTY layout in 1874, for the first commercial typewriter, called the ‘Remmington Number 1’ 

While putting together his original designs, Sholes found that the buttons would often collide and jam.

This meant that letters were being missed and because typewriters didn’t have a ‘backspace’ option, work had to be redone.

In order to fix this, he put the most common letters in hard to reach spots and further apart from each other.

Though this did slow users down; it also countered the case of ‘jamming keys’

Soon, people grew accustomed to using this layout and it eventually found its way into modern computing inventions as well. 

The rest, as they say, is history.