Reason Why Keyboard Alphabets Are Not Arranged In Correct Order!

As a child, We all had our very first encounter with the computer in 6th or 7th standard and every child has more interest in the gadgets than studies. We used to feel a great joy when there was a computer period in our schools. Everything was good about the computers except the keyboard alphabets arrangement. It was very difficult to find the next letter while typing anything and there used to be a great confusion about this. This weird orientation of the keyboard alphabets made it very difficult to learn about computers.

Most of us really found it very difficult to find the alphabets on the keyboard and it used to take a full period if we had to type a single paragraph. At that time, we only had one question, ‘Why are keyboard letters not arranged in order?’. There was no one to answer that question back then, but today we will tell you the reason for these weird arrangements of alphabets on the keyboard.
This is one of the oldest type-writers and the arrangement of the alphabets were like this back then. Have a look at this!

This was the easiest arrangement possible for typing at a great speed and this speed became the reason for mechanical jamming of the buttons and it was very difficult to fix the issue at that time because the jamming of a single button resulted in the opening of the whole machine, changing the paper of the machine and washing the ink with the fingers.


This process used to take hours and it was affecting the efficiency of the work. To overcome this problem, Christopher Latham Sholes, a newspaper editor and printer who lived in Milwaukee in the early 1870s designed “QWERTY” layout for the keyboard, but this was not designed to slow up the typing speed, but to separate all the alphabets to overcome the problem of mechanical jamming.


The reason behind this design was that our index and middle finger has great speed, strength and flexibility, So the most used letters in the English language like ‘E,T,O,I,S,F,N’ were installed in the middle of the keyboard and the less used letters like ‘Q,X,Z,J,K,B,V,W,P,Y’ were installed at the end. The interesting thing about this QWERTY layout is that it was designed for the typewriters, that’s why the alphabets ‘T,Y,P,E,W,R,I,T,E,R,S’ are all in the same row. This was such a genius act by Christopher Latham Sholes.