Why are the keys on a QWERTY keyboard not arranged in alphabetical?

Answer 1

The keys on a QWERTY keyboard are not arranged alphabetically because the creator of typewriter layouts designed it where the most used keys were on the home row or within easy reach of the fingers. The least used letters, like Q, X, and Z, are put at the corners of the keyboard, where the fingers take the most effort to reach. Thus, the Qwerty keyboard was arranged for easier typing.

The QWERTY arrangement began with mechanical typewriters.

Every key was linked by rods and levers to an arm with a letter at the end of it. Pushing the key would cause the arm to tilt forward and make an imprint on the paper. If adjacent keys were pushed in rapid sequence, you would activate two adjacent arms, and run a high risk of getting stuck together as one went up and the other went down.

What the QWERTY keyboard did was to put rarely used letters in between the more commonly used letters and thereby reducing risk of the typing arms jamming.

When electrical typewriters and computers came along the habit was so deeply ingrained that we stuck with it, despite the fact that the original reason no longer existed, and that a keyboard with the most commonly used letters placed centrally would be faster, easier and more ergonomic to type with.

HISTORY

In 1875, the inventor of the first keyboard, Christopher Latham Sholes had to come up with a design to stop the keys from getting stuck in his typing machines. With the help of a study of letter-pair frequency provided by educator Amos Densmore, the brother of Sholes' chief financial backer James Densmore, they found a design to hinder this issue. That study provided them with the information needed to come up with the QWERTY setup that is used today. This design was implemented to prevent adjacent key rods from colliding and getting stuck.

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When the keyboard on a typewriter was first developed, the keys were arranged alphabetically but the mechanisms (striking arms) for the keys tended to become entangled. By spreading out the commonly used keys, this problem was eliminated.

In any event, a purely alphabetic arrangement could use the same hand too many times in a row, preventing you from setting up one hand while the other is typing. It's much faster to type two letters on different hands than two letters on the same hand.