LETTERS: Why common sense and Qwerty prevail

From Mr John Faulls Sir: Christopher Latham Sholes did not design the Qwerty keyboard on the first Remington typewriter simply to slow the typist down ("Mavis just didn't have the touch", 16 January). He designed it so that the typebars carrying letters used in commonly used words would not lie alongside one another.

If typebars carrying t-h-e or a-n-d had been next to each other, the bars would have clashed much more frequently. It is true that fresh keyboard layouts have been proposed which could be operated faster, but they could not be operated by touch typists who had already learnt to type on the existing keyboard and that is why they have never been adopted.

Yours faithfully, JOHN FAULLS Portsmouth, Hampshire 16 January