Somehow I never actually knew what the original QWERTY keyboard’s layout looked like. All the pictures in a google image search were kind of crappy, so here’s keyboard-layout-editor.
I present the original Sholes and Glidden typewriter (Remington No. 1) layout. The 4-row physical layout was actually apparently designed by Mathias Schwalbach, and a QWERTY-like letter arrangement designed by some group effort among Sholes/Glidden/Schwalbach/Densmore (and some friends?), with some slight modifications made by the Remington & Sons company.
(click for editable version)
I also just realized that the capital letters on all our keycap legends are an artifact of this: originally there was no shift key or lower case, so of course the legends showed the capital letters.
It’s pretty clear that the layout was never designed for touch typing, and has little relation to human hands. It’s pretty sad that we’ve been stuck for 140 years with something designed by a few people who didn’t really know what they were doing yet, and had design constraints totally unlike the ones we face today. Sad that IBM, who dominated typewriter/computer design up through the 80s, and their customers, were so risk averse and unwilling to experiment more with better designs. And sad that every other computer company, also super risk averse, just went along with it. I still hold out the hope that we can get past the Sholes/Schwalbach-layout keyboard someday.