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The Case of ‘QWERTY vs. DVORAK’

ANYONE who can type in the English language has good reason to know what “QWERTY” is. The name comes from the first six letters from the left on the top row of the standard typewriter keyboard. But what they may not know is that this arrangement of the keys was actually designed for inefficiency.

When Christopher Latham Sholes and his coworkers developed the first commercially successful typewriter in 1873, they originally had all the letters arranged alphabetically in four rows of keys. But the machine would stick or jam when adjacent keys were struck in quick succession. To overcome this problem, Sholes rearranged the keys by putting the most used letters and combinations as far apart as possible to slow down the operator. The result was the “QWERTY” keyboard.

Since then, virtually every part of the typewriter, except the keyboard, has been redesigned for greater efficiency. Throughout the world, 50 million people labor over this 108-year-old design while unaware of or indifferent to a vastly superior system that has been around for nearly 50 years​—the Dvorak keyboard.

This system, developed by August Dvorak after 20 years of research, puts nine of the 10 most used letters in the middle or “home” row of the keyboard so that over 3,000 words can be typed without the fingers “reaching,” whereas only about 50 words can be typed on “QWERTY’s” home row. The work load is also redistributed among the fingers so that in an average day of work, the fingers of the typist on the Dvorak keyboard move about one mile (1.6 km), compared with 12 to 20 miles (19 to 32 km) on the standard keyboard.

To demonstrate the superiority of his system, Dvorak retrained 14 Navy typists during World War II. In just one month, they were turning out 74 percent more work and were 68 percent more accurate. According to another enthusiast of the Dvorak system, it “is virtually 100% successful in imparting 60-word-a-minute excellence in about the same training time that would have led to 30 words a minute on old qwerty.”

Still, the public remains largely unimpressed. Not many are willing to be nudged out of their comfortable position. Though typewriters with the new keyboard are being offered by most manufacturers, Royal reports that it sells “fewer than 25 machines a year.” Some are hopeful that the advent of computer word-processing technique, where speed is the hallmark, will hasten the demise of the century-old “QWERTY” system. But this remains to be seen.

The case of ‘QWERTY vs. DVORAK’ appears to have fallen by the wayside as another victim of time and circumstances.

[Pictures on page 19]

QWERTY

OUTPUT

DVORAK