Editing QWERTY (section)

===Myths and legends===
There are several legends about the origin of the QWERTY that are difficult to verify.

Stephen Jay Gould had popularized the idea that Clough and Jenne had swapped '''R''' and '''.''' so that Remington's salesmen could type "TYPEWRITER" using only the letters on one row. However, the official name was then still "TYPE-WRITER" and the hyphen was not on that row.

It has often been said that the QWERTY layout had been arranged from the alphabetical layout to minimize the risk of type-bars colliding and thereby jamming the machine.
Some have claimed that the purpose had been to slow typists down to avoid jamming, others that it had been to avoid jamming while typing fast.
What is proven though is that the layout was originally intended for telegraphists who needed to be able to type at the speed at which they received American Morse code - and code at the time could have been transmitted at over 30 words per minute.

One story tells that Densmore's brother Amos who was an educator would have provided Sholes with an ordered list of the most common digraphs (two-letter combinations) in the English language and that Sholes would have relocated letters in those diagrams to place their type-arms further apart. However, that ''could'' have happened after the formation of QWERTY.
Sholes continued to invent improvements to his typewriter for the rest of his life.
In 1889, he filed a patent with a layout which (like [[Dvorak]] 47 years later) had the vowels on one-hand side on the home row.
It was awarded first after his death in 1890.<ref name="uspo568630"/>