QWERTY

In the 1860s Christopher Latham Sholes, a Milwaukee newspaper man and printer, spent years building a writing machine with his collaborators. The keyboard went through many arrangements before settling on the one in front of you, named after the first six letters on its top row.

The familiar story: on early typewriters, each key swung a metal arm, a typebar, up to strike the paper. If two neighbouring arms swung up in quick succession, they could tangle and jam. Moving common letter pairs apart helped keep the arms from clashing.

The challenge: in 2011, researchers Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka at Kyoto University argued that the layout was shaped mainly by early users, especially telegraph operators typing out Morse code at speed. Others answer that the jamming explanation goes back a long way, to early histories of the typewriter.

The truth may include both. One popular claim does look wrong, though: there is no good evidence that QWERTY was designed to slow typists down.

The gun maker Remington began selling the Sholes and Glidden typewriter in 1874. By 1891 Remington claimed more than 100,000 of its QWERTY machines were in use, and when the major makers merged in 1893, QWERTY became the standard. Once millions of people had learned it, there was no going back. Your phone still uses a layout designed for metal arms.

Look closer: The Shift key is named for what it did on a typewriter: it physically shifted the type or carriage so a different, upper-case letter would strike the paper.