I was deeply skeptical, too. Wikipedia calls the "typewriter" unsubstantiated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY. It's re

I was deeply skeptical, too. Wikipedia calls the "typewriter" unsubstantiated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY. It's repeated a lot, though! There's a link to a paper which discusses it in more detail: http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/publications/PreQWERTY.html http://kanji.zinbun.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~yasuoka/publications/PreQ.... Anyway, Wikipedia spends some time discussing jams and so on, so perhaps that's legit.