Keyboard Layout History
If you know how to touch-type and you have no finger, hand, or arm pain after typing for extended periods, then you can skip this post. If you do experience pain during or after typing, then you may want to explore using an ergonomic keyboard or a different keyboard layout. If you haven’t learned to touch-type yet, you owe it to yourself to at least consider learning on an ergonomic keyboard with a Dvorak keyboard layout.
More than 98% of people that type, use a QWERTY keyboard or typewriter. They are called QWERTY because that is the order of the first six keys in the top row of the alphabetical key section of the standard keyboard. Did you ever wonder why the keys are in that particular arrangement?
Let’s go back to the year 1850. This was not the stone age. The population of the U.S. was 23 million and steam power had just been applied to printing presses, so there were millions of books and newspapers with easy to read text. But there were no computers and no typewriters. Imagine millions of people manually writing things down. If just a small percentage of that written material was unreadable, that amounted to a gigantic waste of time for businesses that had to have legible records. That led to the invention of typewriters - machines that allowed people to create documents that were easily and consistently readable.
There is much debate about why early typewriters were developed with key layouts that ended up having the letters QWERTY at the beginning of the top row. Some mechanical machines were designed with the letters in an alphabetical order: ABCDE… There are at least three theories as to why the original layouts were changed. The original, and most popular, was that the mechanical keys were put as close as possible to each other to save space and that when two keys right next to each other were typed in sequence too quickly, the adjacent key elements would hit each other and jam up, or at least slow down the typist. To fix that, the order of the keys had to be rearranged to slow down the users. A later adjustment to that theory, stated that the rearrangement of the layout was needed to allow the user to type as quickly as possible, without jamming the mechanical elements. I’m sure their sales pitch was, “this new layout design allows the typist to produce perfect, readable documents faster than ever before humanly possible.” Finally, people who didn’t want anybody to think there was any reason to slow down typists, spread the idea that the changes were made to accommodate telegraph operators.
One of the early typewriter manufacturers patented an early QWERTY layout in 1878 and then made a deal with the gun maker Remington for mass production. By 1890, there were more than 100,000 QWERTY typewriters in use. The layout became a real standard in 1893 when the five largest typewriter manufacturers merged to form the Union Typewriter Company and QWERTY became their default key layout.
In the early 1900s, a professor of education named August Dvorak served as an advisor to a woman writing her master’s thesis on typing errors. Dvorak studied the QWERTY keyboard layout to see if it was the optimum design to reduce typing errors. Dvorak got his brother-in-law, another professor of education, to assist him in his research. They attended seminars on the science of motion, reviewed slow-motion films of typists, studied the physiology of the human hand, and researched the most used letters and letter combinations in the English language. They continued this work for at least 17 years, trying to design a key layout that would minimize the problems of the QWERTY layout. They discovered that over 3000 English language words are typed by the left hand alone and that 300 words are typed using only the right hand when using the QWERTY layout. Obviously, the optimum typing pattern for each word is to type one letter using one hand, the next letter using the other hand, and to then alternate hands for the entire word. That can’t be achieved for every word, of course, but the layout that has the most words that alternate hands and has the least amount of finger travel, would be the most efficient layout for typing speed and for lessening finger, hand, and arm strain. Another bad statistic for the QWERTY layout is the fact that only 32% of all English language typing is done on the “home row.” That’s the middle row of the three rows of alphabetical keys on the modern keyboard. There are eight keys that your eight fingers rest on and there are two more keys (one to the right of your left index finger and one to the left of your right index finger,) in this home row. You obviously want as many words as possible, typed using only those eight keys where your fingers rest.
I’ve got more to come in future posts, but I want to end this post with three links. It is so hard to find information on the Dvorak layout that I will include more links in future posts, but I will start out here with the usual starting point – Wikipedia. You should start with a general background article about keyboard layouts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboar...
Then the Wikipedia article about the Dvorak layout:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_...
Finally, a very detailed article with the subtitle: “Forty Years of Frustration.”:
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/ergo...
Let me know if you find any of these links informative.
More than 98% of people that type, use a QWERTY keyboard or typewriter. They are called QWERTY because that is the order of the first six keys in the top row of the alphabetical key section of the standard keyboard. Did you ever wonder why the keys are in that particular arrangement?
Let’s go back to the year 1850. This was not the stone age. The population of the U.S. was 23 million and steam power had just been applied to printing presses, so there were millions of books and newspapers with easy to read text. But there were no computers and no typewriters. Imagine millions of people manually writing things down. If just a small percentage of that written material was unreadable, that amounted to a gigantic waste of time for businesses that had to have legible records. That led to the invention of typewriters - machines that allowed people to create documents that were easily and consistently readable.
There is much debate about why early typewriters were developed with key layouts that ended up having the letters QWERTY at the beginning of the top row. Some mechanical machines were designed with the letters in an alphabetical order: ABCDE… There are at least three theories as to why the original layouts were changed. The original, and most popular, was that the mechanical keys were put as close as possible to each other to save space and that when two keys right next to each other were typed in sequence too quickly, the adjacent key elements would hit each other and jam up, or at least slow down the typist. To fix that, the order of the keys had to be rearranged to slow down the users. A later adjustment to that theory, stated that the rearrangement of the layout was needed to allow the user to type as quickly as possible, without jamming the mechanical elements. I’m sure their sales pitch was, “this new layout design allows the typist to produce perfect, readable documents faster than ever before humanly possible.” Finally, people who didn’t want anybody to think there was any reason to slow down typists, spread the idea that the changes were made to accommodate telegraph operators.
One of the early typewriter manufacturers patented an early QWERTY layout in 1878 and then made a deal with the gun maker Remington for mass production. By 1890, there were more than 100,000 QWERTY typewriters in use. The layout became a real standard in 1893 when the five largest typewriter manufacturers merged to form the Union Typewriter Company and QWERTY became their default key layout.
In the early 1900s, a professor of education named August Dvorak served as an advisor to a woman writing her master’s thesis on typing errors. Dvorak studied the QWERTY keyboard layout to see if it was the optimum design to reduce typing errors. Dvorak got his brother-in-law, another professor of education, to assist him in his research. They attended seminars on the science of motion, reviewed slow-motion films of typists, studied the physiology of the human hand, and researched the most used letters and letter combinations in the English language. They continued this work for at least 17 years, trying to design a key layout that would minimize the problems of the QWERTY layout. They discovered that over 3000 English language words are typed by the left hand alone and that 300 words are typed using only the right hand when using the QWERTY layout. Obviously, the optimum typing pattern for each word is to type one letter using one hand, the next letter using the other hand, and to then alternate hands for the entire word. That can’t be achieved for every word, of course, but the layout that has the most words that alternate hands and has the least amount of finger travel, would be the most efficient layout for typing speed and for lessening finger, hand, and arm strain. Another bad statistic for the QWERTY layout is the fact that only 32% of all English language typing is done on the “home row.” That’s the middle row of the three rows of alphabetical keys on the modern keyboard. There are eight keys that your eight fingers rest on and there are two more keys (one to the right of your left index finger and one to the left of your right index finger,) in this home row. You obviously want as many words as possible, typed using only those eight keys where your fingers rest.
I’ve got more to come in future posts, but I want to end this post with three links. It is so hard to find information on the Dvorak layout that I will include more links in future posts, but I will start out here with the usual starting point – Wikipedia. You should start with a general background article about keyboard layouts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboar...
Then the Wikipedia article about the Dvorak layout:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_...
Finally, a very detailed article with the subtitle: “Forty Years of Frustration.”:
http://infohost.nmt.edu/~shipman/ergo...
Let me know if you find any of these links informative.
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Every technology has a history and the history is mostly told in terms of the iterations of objective developments with less attention to contexts. Qualitative researchers - especially those interested in narrative - would emphasize more of the shaping forces of economic, political, sociological, and psychological contexts.
You are making something that would ordinarily be of low interest to me fascinating! Thank you!