Why do keyboards use QWERTY?
It was designed around the mechanical constraints of a machine nobody uses any more, and it survived because everyone had already learned it.
Simple intuition
The plain reason, in everyday words
Early typewriters struck the paper with metal arms swinging up from a basket. If two arms that sat next to each other were used in quick succession, they collided and jammed, and the typist had to stop and separate them by hand. So the layout was arranged to keep frequently paired letters apart in the basket, reducing jams. That is a solution to a problem that stopped existing when typebars did — electric typewriters, then computers, have no arms to tangle. But by then millions of people had learned the layout, every machine was built with it, and every new typist learned it because that was what the machines had. The arrangement outlived its reason by more than a century, and it will almost certainly outlive everyone reading this.
QWERTY was designed to slow typists down.
It was designed to reduce typebar jams by separating common letter pairs in the basket. A machine that does not jam is faster overall, so slowing the typist was not the objective.
Dvorak is proven to be much faster.
The most-cited study was conducted by Dvorak himself and has been heavily criticised. Independent evaluations find small or negligible differences.
QWERTY survives only because nobody has tried to replace it.
Alternatives have been freely available in software for decades, and adoption remains negligible. The obstacle is the individually borne cost of relearning, not availability.
The jamming story is the whole origin.
Documentary research suggests telegraph operators transcribing Morse influenced the arrangement substantially, which would mean the layout was optimised for a use case that has been forgotten entirely.
It is the standard example for lock-in, and it is more interesting than the standard telling, because the evidence that the incumbent is meaningfully worse is much weaker than the story requires. That double lesson is worth having: entrenched standards genuinely do persist past their reasons, and the confident claim that a familiar standard is badly suboptimal often turns out to rest on a study nobody checked.
Who worked it out
Christopher Latham Sholes developed the layout across several iterations between 1868 and 1873, adjusting it to reduce typebar collisions before selling the design to Remington.
What problem forced it
Research by Koichi Yasuoka has argued that early adopters transcribing Morse code influenced the arrangement, meaning the layout may have been shaped by telegraphy as much as by mechanical jamming.
How it changed since
Remington's commercial success made it the de facto standard, touch typing instruction entrenched it, and August Dvorak's 1936 alternative and later designs such as Colemak have never displaced it despite being freely selectable in software.
Why some countries drive on the left
The same lock-in structure, with a much larger switching cost and a couple of countries that paid it anyway.
How standards get established
Being first, being good enough and being cheap to adopt matter more than being best — repeatedly.
Written for Curio rather than collected from a forum — it is part of the curated corpus that ships with the platform. The references it draws on are listed under Sources.