Was the QWERTY keyboard purposely designed to slow typists?

[raycy]

｢Interestingly, Koichi Yasuoka claims that Sholes himself tried to improve on QWERTY! To summarize, it is probably fair to say that Sholes didn't try to slow the typist down, but any notion that QWERTY was designed for the benefit of the user must be viewed with suspicion.｣