Have you seen this arrangement of letters before? Look at the top of the keyboard on your laptop or smartphone and you'll see that, yes, you have. Your keyboard is called a Qwerty keyboard, and although you've probably never thought about the order of the letters on it, your fingers know it every time they type something.
So who put the letters in this order? And how did they decide which order was the easiest to use?
The Qwerty keyboard was invented for the new mechanical typewriter in 1867, by an American, Christopher Sholes. On his first design, Sholes put all the letters in alphabetical order. However, there was a problem; in the alphabet the most-used letters are often next to each other, and when typists were typing quickly, the letters often stuck together. So the keyboards was rearranged and Q-W-E-R-T-Y was born.
In 1873, the Qwerty keyboard was used by Remington, the makers of the first popular typewriters. Since then, all typists in English and most other European languages, have been using the Qwerty keyboard. But is the Qwerty design the most efficient for modern digital keyboards, where there's no problem of letters sticking together? The answer is no, it probably isn't, and there have been many suggestions for more efficient keyboards. It's unlikely that we're ever going to make the change from the familiar Qwerty, however, and it probably wouldn't make much difference to our typing speeds anyway.
