Why QWERTY?

QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout on English-language computer and typewriter keyboards. It takes its name from the first six characters seen in the far left of the keyboard's top first row of letters. It was devised and created in the early 1870s by Christopher Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Milwaukee.

For years, popular writers have accused Sholes of deliberately arranging his keyboard to slow down fast typists who would otherwise jam up his sluggish machine. But in fact, his motives were just the opposite.

Sholes' early machines had many defects: the printing point was located beneath the paper carriage, and so was invisible to the operator. Consequently, the tendency of the typebars to clash and jam if struck in rapid succession was a particularly serious problem. Sholes struggled for the next six years to perfect his invention, making many trial-and-error rearrangements of the original machine's alphabetical key arrangement in an effort to reduce the frequency of typebar clashes. Eventually he arrived at a four-row, upper case keyboard approaching the modern QWERTY standard.

Trivia: The longest International English words typable using only the top row of letters are TYPEWRITER, PROPRIETOR, and PERPETUITY.