Hey, Professor Touchscreen, keep your fingers off our Qwerty keyboards This is an obvious improvement. But it is not that surprising, because many difficult-to-spell pointy-headed academics, think the Qwerty keyboard is one of the least efficient pieces of kit ever invented. Indeed, if we believe them, it is a miracle that this article ever made it on to the page. It would be quicker to scratch out my words using a stylus and wax tablet, and shout the finished article through a cup attached to a piece of string, than type it using a standard keyboard. But the reason for Qwerty's inefficiency is also the reason for its success. Typewriters were invented by Christopher Sholes, a Wisconsin senator and newspaper editor. His first attempt, logically, placed all the keys in alphabetical order. But this meant that the mechanical levers, attached to the keys, became jammed if someone typed too quickly. So, after many experiments, he moved the most commonly used keys apart. Thus the Qwerty was born. In fact, it was originally Qwe.ty - but then Remington, famous for its sewing machines and guns, and which produced Sholes's typewriter, moved the R to a more prominent position. There is no proof that Sholes wanted to slow down typing; he just wanted to stop his machine from becoming a ball of jumbled metal. But the effect was the same - typing using a Qwerty just isn't very quick. Also, the spacing out of common pairings of letters is responsible for millions of people developing repetitive strain injury. There are many other machines that allow people to type more swiftly and safely, most notably the Dvoˇrák board (invented by a distant cousin of the Czech composer), developed in the Thirties. Crucially, this version allows your fingers to jump and stretch less and your left hand and right hand are used equally - with a Qwerty, your left hand does well over half the work. The world record for typing on this version is more than 200 words a minute, a speed that would cause snapped fingers with a Qwerty board. And if it's supersonic typing you are after, you should have seen the old stenographers at work at the Old Bailey, who used strange machines that worked like pianos - they struck chords that produced phonetic sounds like "th" and "sh" and could type more than 300 words a minute. Qwerty has survived for the simple reason that it got there first and provided a machine for a world that craved standardisation. This was the era when a nut produced in Manchester would not fit a bolt manufactured in London. As Professor Doron Swade, a computer historian, says: "The big lesson of Qwerty was the fact that it was standard; it wasn't the most efficient or the most ergonomically sound." To anyone who touch‑types, using Qwerty is as automatic as handwriting. That is why, despite its myriad faults, Qwerty must stay. It is hard‑wired into our brains; to create two separate keyboards for different devices would cause a major short circuit.