I believe history has it that the querty keyboard layout was intentionally designed to slow down the typing speed, because the mechanical efficiency of the first gen/early typewriters (1860/70?) was fairly low, causing the moving prongs to jam if typing was done rapidly.
I also believe the dvorak layout (which got invented later and never gained much popularity) allows measurably faster typing (never used it myself). I think the older Apple keyboards used to have a qwerty/dvorak switch on the backside. Any dvorak users/fans here, I wonder?