Today I found out why I am crap at typing. It is that damned QWERTY keyboard that constantly trips me up. I also realized – yet again – that I know nothing and after almost 37 years alive I’ve still managed to miss key historical information about the one tool I’ve just more than any other – the keyboard. You probably all know this, but it was a mystery to me until today.

Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA, invented a typewriter in September 1867. As with previous attempts the keys were in an ABCDEFG layout and the typists soon got too fast and jammed the keys. The key levers hit the platen from underneath and then fell back down under gravity.

Instead of putting return spring to fix the problem, he asked his brother in law to devise a different layout of the keys. Publicly he said it was to put the most commonly used letters far apart on the keyboard to reduce the chances of the levers jamming. The result was the QWERTY layout that we all know and hate.

So what does this mean? It means that the keyboard layout was invented to slow typists down. We are all hacking away on keyboards that were designed to be hard to use! And we’ve been doing it for almost 150 years!

I’m sure most of us assumed that the arbitrary jumble of letters at our fingertips was there to make things easier, not harder. I suspect our lives are full of such things. We’re just too busy trying to make sense of things, to realize there is no sense to make in the first place...

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