India, Sept. 29 -- You may use a keyboard every day. Odds are, you never think about the six letters on the top left corner: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. It seems unnecessarily complicated to arrange the alphabet out-of-order. And yet, this keyboard layout has endured.

The reason why ABCD... isn't on your keyboard doesn't have to do with computers, but with a much older machine: the typewriter.

In the 1860s, American inventor Christopher Latham Sholes was working on a way to build a machine that could print letters using mechanical arms. His very first keyboard wasn't arranged in the familiar QWERTY pattern; in fact, it was mostly in alphabetical order.

As Sholes and his colleagues worked on improving the design, they tinkered with the arrangement of ...