Today's useless fact - Why are the letters on the keyboard arranged the way they are?

The current keyboard layouts are borrowed from the design of the first type writers. The Sholes & Glidden type writer, the first of its kind, was introduced to an unsuspecting public by the Remington family of gunmakers in 1874. The Sholes & Glidden was a heavy, bulky, barely functional machine that jammed in a strong breeze. As a result, its puzzling new QWERTY keyboard was designed to be difficult.

That's right -- the slower you typed, the less chance that the keyboard spokes (not the official term) would slam into one another as they rushed towards the page. The keyboard we use today is essentially a "paragon of inefficiency."

While other keyboard arrangements have been proposed, ones that actually make it easier to type, they've generally met the same fate of being rekected in favor of the difficult ones we use today. Check out the links in our Keyboard category and Keyboard Layout category for more.