Why are the letters on the keyboard arranged as they are?

in the late 1800s, typewriters jammed easily, so a guy (Sholes, i think) rearranged the letters to slow down typists. that reduced the number of typewriter jams. for some dumb reason, the qwerty keyboard is still around.

The QWERTYUIOP keyboard (I hope that's how you spell it) is not an efficient layout but was used because of the problems with early mechanical typewriters. There are much better layouts (see link below for an example) that would give faster typing speeds but people are too set in their ways make the change. Did you know? The longest English word that can be written using the letters on the top row of a typewriter is.....typewriter.

Keyboards were first seen on typewriters, where hitting the key would mechanically activate an arm with a letter on the end. This arm would hit a ribbon an imprint the ink from the ribbon onto the paper behind it with the shape of the letter. The problem with this system was that typists became quite fast at typing and sometimes these arms would hit each other during typing. There is a commonly held belief that the QWERTY arrangement was designed to slow down typists to prevent these clashes but the opposite is true. by re-arranging the letters, common combinations could be used more quickly without the arms clashing. Hope this helps.

that first answer has to be made up, because once you learn where the keys are, you will be just as fast. It makes no difference where they are. I wonder too.