[piltdownman]

This is somewhat compounded by the fact the QWERTY layout itself is an inefficient legacy remnant of typewriters, whereby the most utilised keys would have a tendency to stick together if placed side by side, so QWERTY was envisaged as a way of spacing out these keys across the keyboard. Not for ergonomics or efficiency, but as an engineering workaround.

[cge]

There appears to be some disagreement on whether that is true, for example, in this paper: https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433...