There is a story everyone seems to know about the QWERTY keyboard: that its scrambled letters were arranged deliberately to slow typists down, a piece of engineering sabotage meant to keep fingers from outrunning the machine. It is a tidy tale, and the historical record does not support it.

The layout came from Christopher Latham Sholes in the 1870s, and the problem he was solving was mechanical, not human. Early typewriters struck the page with type bars, thin metal arms that swung up on a shared pivot. When two neighbouring bars were thrown in quick succession, they could collide and jam, tangling mid-swing and stopping the typist cold. Sholes's answer was to study which letter pairs came up most often together and then pull those pairs apart on the keyboard, so the bars that most wanted to clash were sitting far enough from each other to stay out of one another's way. The arrangement was not about the typist at all. It was about the hardware, a careful separation designed to keep the machinery from fouling itself.

And here is the quiet irony the exhibit keeps returning to: the constraint that shaped the layout stopped existing more than a century ago. There are no type bars to jam under a modern keyboard, no swinging arms to keep apart. The reason QWERTY looks the way it looks was solved and then forgotten, and yet the layout outlived the machine it was built for, carried forward by habit and muscle memory long after its whole justification disappeared. We type on the ghost of a jam that can no longer happen.