I have started a conversation in Facebook with a friend who collects old typewriters. Certainly the question of hand/finger confusion is argued against by the fact that with the QWERTY keyboard, the E and R keys are right next to each other and the E and D keys are too. Those combinations have to be up towards the top of letter pairs in frequency in the English language. I also question whether the device was called a typewriter when the QWERTY layout was devised.