Why is the first row of your keyboard QWERTYUIOP instead of ABCDEFG?

The first row of your keyboard reads Q W E R T Y U I O P. Not A B C D E F G.

Wouldn't alphabetical order be easier to find? In 1868, when an American named Sholes built one of the first typewriters, the keys really were in alphabetical order, laid out like a piano.

The problem was the machine. Each key was attached to a metal bar. Press a key, and the bar swung up and struck the letter onto the paper. Type fast enough and two bars sitting next to each other would meet in mid-air, jam, and stop the whole machine. So Sholes spread out the letters that often appear together, like "th" and "he", so their bars would not rise at the same moment. That is the standard answer in textbooks.

But there is a hole in it. E and R sit right next to each other, and "er" is the fourth most common letter pair in English. If the goal was to separate common pairs, why put those two together? Somebody dug up one of Sholes's early prototypes and found that he once moved R to where the period key sits.

In 2011, two researchers at Kyoto University read through the records of early typists and offered a different explanation. Many of the first typists were telegraph operators. They listened to Morse code and had to write the letters down fast. In American Morse, the letter Z is "... .", which sounds almost exactly like S followed by E, especially at the start of a word. So S had to sit next to both Z and E. In their view, the typist came before the keyboard.

What really locked QWERTY in was the year 1893. The biggest typewriter companies merged into one, and together they made QWERTY the industry standard. Remington even ran typing schools, and anyone who learned on their keyboard would buy their machines next time. By the time computers arrived and the metal bars disappeared for good, hundreds of millions of people had already learned it.

This has a name: path dependence. A decision stays because it is already there.

Try this: using only the top row, can you spell TYPEWRITER? You can. T, Y, P, E, W, R and I all live on the first row. See if you can find another word you can type with one row alone.