Why the QWERTY Layout Exists, and Why It Stayed
The letter order on your keyboard reached its modern form in a patent granted to Christopher Latham Sholes in 1878, four years after the first Sholes and Glidden typewriter went on sale through E. Remington and Sons. Nothing in that arrangement was planned around fingers resting on a home row, and nothing in it has moved since, which is the fact underneath every argument about better layouts.
What the machine needed
An early typewriter swung a metal typebar upwards to strike the paper from below. The bars sat side by side in a semicircular basket, and two neighbouring bars struck in quick succession would collide and lock together, forcing the operator to stop and separate them by hand. Pulling apart the letter pairs that English uses most often reduced how often that happened.
That much has a mechanical explanation behind it, and it explains why the layout looks scattered rather than alphabetical. The constraint was the basket, not the hand.
The familiar claim that the order was designed to slow typists down is a separate claim, and it stays disputed rather than settled. Separating common pairs lets a machine accept faster input without jamming, which points the opposite way. One line of historical research traces the arrangement instead to American Morse telegraph operators transcribing incoming code, whose letter sequences differ from those of ordinary prose. What can be said fairly is that the layout came out of several rounds of commercial revision, and that no document has surfaced in which anyone records an intention to make typing slower.
Why it outlived the mechanism
Typebar collisions stopped mattering with electric typewriters and stopped existing with computer keyboards, yet the arrangement stayed. Three forces held it in place. Remington sold machines together with training, so the first generation of paid typists learned this order and carried it from employer to employer. Employers then bought the machines their staff could already use. National variants were finally built on top of QWERTY instead of against it: QWERTZ swaps Y and Z for German, AZERTY moves a handful of keys for French, and both leave most of the order untouched.
So the standard is held in place by the number of people who already know it. Our keyboard test draws five layouts, and four of them are recognisable descendants of that 1878 order.
What ISO/IEC 9995 settles, and what it leaves alone
Standards bodies did get involved, though not in the way most people assume. ISO/IEC 9995 sets out a reference framework for key positions: rows are lettered from A at the bottom to E at the digit row, and each position carries an identifier such as E00 or D01, so a specification can point at a physical key without naming any character. The standard also describes the levels one key can carry, which is how a single key holds a lowercase letter, a capital and an AltGr symbol.
What it does not do is tell any country which letter belongs in which position. Position numbering is fixed, letter assignment is national. Physical shape is a third question, covered in ISO against ANSI: Enter shape, left Shift width and one extra key.
Two figures people quote
Of the eight most frequent letters in written English, only three sit on the QWERTY home row. That is a real weakness of the arrangement, and it is the starting point for every alternative layout ever proposed.
Every letter in the word typewriter can be typed from the top row alone. That one is a curiosity rather than evidence of intent, and it gets repeated as though it settled something.
What the history means for your hands
The layout is arbitrary, fixed, and almost certainly the one you will use for the rest of your working life. Learning it properly is a better use of a month than replacing it, because the differences claimed between layouts are small next to the difference between eight fingers and two. If the alternatives interest you anyway, the arithmetic of switching is in Dvorak and Colemak compared.
The work starts on the home row, since that is where the arrangement is weakest and where technique makes up the difference. The finger assignments are set out in the home row guide, and they are the same on every descendant of the 1878 order.
One more consequence of the history is easy to mistake for clumsiness. Because national variants differ by only a few keys, a machine set to the wrong variant produces almost correct output, so the mistakes read as bad typing rather than as a settings problem. Press a key and compare the physical position the tester reports against the character that actually arrives; when the two disagree, the layout is wrong and your hands are fine.
If you want to feel how the arrangement handles the letter pairs it was built around, take a passage from the years in which it had already won. The eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, printed in 1911, lists old English and Scottish measuring standards across 315 characters, with a year in brackets and a semicolon after almost every entry. Frances Hodgson Burnett published The Secret Garden in the same year, and its 468 characters on the matted rose stems inside the high walls make a comfortable longer run. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote Spring in 1877, where alliteration pushes the same letters together across 401 characters, which asks one finger to fire twice in a row and is reliably where a repeat goes missing without you noticing. All three are waiting in the typing test, each with its author, year and source on its own page.