Despite the commonly held belief, the Qwerty keyboard was not actually invented to slow down typists and thereby reduce typewriter jams. It was created to reduce jams, yes, but it did this by separating common letter pairs from each other. It also attempted to increase speed by having many letter pairs on different hands. Notice how much faster you can type the word "pair" than the word "oily".

I imagine it would have been quite an interesting statistical challenge to work out the layout and in truth the Qwerty layout was probably a fairly rough attempt. Others have attempted to create better layouts but their efforts have all been in vain, unable to sway enough typists from the familiar.

Anyway, that's enough of the keyboard geek-out. You can read up more on the Wikipedia page (where I stole all this info). OK, one last thing...

According to an urban legend, the top row was designed to have all the letters for the word "typewriter" so that typewriter salesmen could "hunt and peck" the word "typewriter" with one finger for demonstration purposes.This was in the period when typing was considered women's work and men rarely could type.