QWERTY won by being first and trained, not by being the best keyboard.

In 1866 Christopher Latham Sholes, a Wisconsin newspaper publisher, co-invented a machine to number documents, and a fellow inventor suggested it could print letters too. With printer S.W. Soule they built a typewriter, and after about thirty models they settled on the QWERTY arrangement.

Historians disagree on why: some say the layout spaced common letters to reduce typebar jamming, while later researchers argue it grew out of telegraph operators transcribing Morse code. Either way, the machine came to market in 1874 as the Remington No. 1, the first commercially successful typewriter.

QWERTY then spread through offices and typing schools, so each generation learned the same layout. When alternative layouts such as Dvorak claimed to be faster, the switching cost in retraining and muscle memory stayed higher than the promised gain, and QWERTY was simply kept.

First installed base creates its own lock-in

The Sholes and Glidden machine shipped first and its layout became the one people learned on.

Typing instruction and office habit created a base of trained users who did not want to relearn.

The alleged efficiency gain from alternatives was small enough that retraining was not worth it.

Every later device copied QWERTY, so no alternative could build its own installed base.

A design wins when it is the one people are already trained on, and network effects in human skill are often stronger than a measurable efficiency gain.

QWERTY survived the IBM Selectric, the first personal computers, the BlackBerry and the touchscreen phone, all through the same mechanism: people type this way because that is how they were taught. It remains the world's default layout over a century and a half later.