Why QWERTY Has an 'A' Where It Does

Christopher Latham Sholes filed the first patent for his typewriter in 1868 with a layout that was almost alphabetical. The machine worked, in a sense: it printed letters when you hit keys. It also jammed constantly, because the metal typebars of commonly-paired letters sat next to each other and collided at speed. Sholes rearranged the keys to pull frequent bigrams apart. TH, ST, ER — put the letters at opposite ends of the keyboard, and the typebars could swing back without tangling.

The layout that went into the Remington No. 2 in 1878 is essentially the modern QWERTY. An 'A' ended up on the left side of the home row because moving it further made the mechanism worse, not better. The home row itself — A, S, D, F, G, H, J, K, L — was picked so common letters could be struck without the fingers leaving the row. Sholes was reportedly unsatisfied with the result and kept trying to improve it until his death in 1890.

Remington's main competitor, the Sholes & Glidden, became the market standard less because of design quality and more because Remington trained an army of stenographers on it. August Dvorak published a redesigned layout in 1936 — vowels on the home row left, most-used consonants home row right — and it is measurably faster for some users. It has never displaced QWERTY.

Paul David's 1985 paper in the American Economic Review used this as the canonical example of path dependence: a technology wins, installed base locks in, and even a better alternative can't dislodge it. You learned QWERTY because your teacher learned QWERTY because a typebar in 1868 wanted to be somewhere else.