QWERTY keyboards made typists faster by reducing lever jams

The QWERTY keyboard layout was specifically designed to resolve the issue of key jamming in early typewriters. Here's how it addressed this mechanical bottleneck:

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Mechanical typewriters are a tough design problem. The levers and the keys are connected. The QWERTY design was designed to solve the bottleneck of stopping levers getting jammed and stopping the typing process. It did that by reducing the chance that two adjacent levers would be typed based on patterns of the English language. This issue no longer exists with electric keyboards which if have noticed - don’t have levers!

The problem is that it takes time to learn any keyboard standard and so it’s hard to retrain with a keyboard layout like DVORAK which is intended to optimize human hand movement.

It’s like one can build a more logical language than English but how do get millions of people to learn and use it. This is standards lock-in or otherwise known as the Network effect.

The complete story is more rich and complex. My friend Jason brought this interesting paper to my attention:

https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/139379/1/42_161.pdf