Dvorak vs. Qwerty: Will Tradition Win Again?.
Shirley Boes Neill · Phi Delta Kappan · 1980
Can a revolutionary change ? even if it's clearly a better way of doing something ? be throttled by tradition and habit? Was Emerson wrong? So far the answer is certainly yes in the case of a vastly improved typewriter key board. Despite a record of proven success in the 50 years since it was invented, the Dvorak keyboard remains mostly un known. A small band of undaunted propo nents is predicting a full-scale revolution in 10 to 15 years. They talk about these kinds of possible changes: The business world would benefit through increased production, lowered costs, and happier employees; education would have a new tool in its battle to help students become proficient in reading and writing. When the revolution comes ? if it comes ? Oregon will reap the accolades or take the blame. Before we probe the future, however, it's necessary to review the past. In 1873 Christopher Latham Sholes completed his experimental work for the world's first practical typewriter. A skilled mechanic in a Milwaukee machine shop, Sholes was interested in inventing a machine that could write with print char acters and that could be operated at a then inconceivable rate: equal to handwrit ing. The machine originally designed by Sholes and his colleagues featured a key board with an alphabetical arrangement. It was unsatisfactory. Further experi mentation led to the or Stan dard keyboard, named for the first six let ters in the third of the keyboard. The Qwerty keyboard met the inventor's ob jective of preventing the keys from jam ming, but it did so by forcing the operator to slow down. The machine was anti engineered, intentionally making many commonly used letter sequences awkward to reach and slow to execute. The burden of work was placed on the left hand (while most persons are right-handed), and the fingers were constantly required to move away from row (the of let ters on which the fingers rest). For several decades following Sholes's invention, suggestions were made for im provement, and many models appeared. Some basic changes were made in the mechanical operation of the typewriter, but the Qwerty keyboard remained intact. With the turn of the century came touch typing (memorizing the placement of let ters and numbers and using all fingers to type), a vast improvement over the hunt and-peck, two-finger method. It took considerably longer for some one to realize the fundamental weakness of the Qwerty keyboard. That someone was August Dvorak, director of research at the University of Washington. With the help of two grants from the Carnegie Cor poration, Dvorak analyzed the problems of teaching and learning typing. He ap plied the scientific principles of time and motion and studied the English language to determine the usual sequence and fre quency of letters. After 20 years of study and the testing of dozens of keyboards, he concluded that even a random keyboard arrangement would be superior t? Qwer ty. It was so difficult to master, he found, that it took twice as long to learn as it should and a large proportion of typing students never reached the minimum ac ceptable level of 40 words per minute. Dvorak's rearranged and simplified keyboard emerged in 1932. On the Dvorak, also called the DSK or ASK (American Simplified Keyboard), home included all vowels and the most fre quently used consonants. Consequently, 70% of typing is done on home row, 22% on the third row, and 8% on the bottom row. Movement of the fingers from to is reduced by more than 90%. At a speed of 100 words per minute, a typist's fingers travel a little over a mile in motions on the Dvorak keyboard during an eight-hour day, compared with 12 to 20 miles on the old-style Qwerty keyboard. The burden of typing is shifted, more over, to the right hand, and to the stronger, longer fingers. Dvorak's key board makes the right hand responsible for 56% of ordinary copy, the left hand for 44%. On the Qwerty, the exact op posite is true. The rearrangement of let ters on the simplified keyboard also meant that almost no word or syllable could be written by the right hand alone and very few by the left hand alone, resulting in rhythmic, even stroking.