Guns, Germs, and Steel

From the book, Guns, Germs, and Steel; (Guns, Germs and Steel was initially subtitled The Fates of Human Societies. Within a few months, this subtitle had evolved into (A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years)...

• Page 248 explains the QWERTY keyboard as such: "…[the keyboard] employs a whole series of perverse tricks designed to force typists to type as slowly as possible, such as scattering the most common letters over all keyboard rows and concentrating them on the left side (where right-handed people have to use their weaker hand). The reason behind all those seemingly counterproductive features is that the typewriters of 1873 jammed if adjacent keys were struck in quick succession, so that manufactures had to slow down typists." Then it goes on to say we could double our typing speed and lower our efforts by 95% but the QWERTY keyboard has been so ingrained that after 60 or so years (since the improved one was invented) we still use old QWERTY.