May 12, 1936: Dvorak Patents Keyboard...

Apple wireless Dvorak keyboard

1936: University of Washington education professor August Dvorak receives a patent for the keyboard that bears his name.

The seed for a new layout was planted in Dvorak’s mind when he served as adviser to a student who was writing a master’s thesis about typing errors. Because touch-typing had become widespread, Dvorak concluded that a new, more efficient layout needed to be devised to serve people with high words-per-minute rates.

The prevalent QWERTY key layout was implemented in the first economically successful typewriters, because that configuration tended to prevent the mechanical typebars from jamming as they converged near the typewriter ribbon. Dvorak recognized the QWERTY layout had a number of inherent flaws.

He calculated that more than half of all keystrokes occurred on the top row, requiring typists to move their fingers off the home row keys. What’s more, most key presses were performed by the left (typically nondominant) hand, and about 30 percent of all typing was performed in the bottom row, which is the slowest and hardest to reach.

Dvorak and his brother-in-law John Dealey, an education professor at North Texas State Teachers College, set to work to scientifically design a keyboard that would decrease typos and increase speed. The pair researched the science of motion, pored over slow-motion films of typists, and even analyzed the English language to determine the most commonly used letters and letter combinations.

From this rigorous process was born the first version of the Dvorak keyboard in 1932. The patent application was filed May 21 of that year and granted May 12, 1936.

Dvorak began training typists on his keyboard and entering them in typing competitions. These typists won scores of awards in typing contests across the country using the Dvorak keyboard. It got to the point where contestants using QWERTY keyboards actually asked that Dvorak boards be banned from competitions because the key configuration presented an “unfair advantage.”

Not long after Dvorak’s keyboard was released, the Tacoma, Washington, school district began an experiment using the new layout. Teachers trained 2,700 students on Dvorak keyboards and found the students were able to master the typewriter in one-third the time it took to learn QWERTY. Oddly, after a new school board was elected, it decided to terminate the Dvorak classes.

Despite its efficiency and easy learning curve, the Dvorak keyboard remains a piece of fringe hardware (or nowadays, software). The fact that it was never widely adopted can be traced back to a number of different factors.

Dvorak released his keyboard configuration in the midst of the Great Depression, when most people and companies simply could not afford to invest in new typewriters. When World War II hit, many typewriter plants switched to making small arms and halted production of all new typewriters — including ones with Dvorak layouts.

And there was also the question of acceptance. When it was introduced, typists were already used to using QWERTY keyboards and were resistant to switching. Add the fact most schools taught typing on QWERTY (the equipment they already had on hand), and the spread of Dvorak keyboards was all but thwarted.

To this day very few people use the Dvorak, but there are a few famous proponents: Steve Wozniak, BitTorrent inventor Bram Cohen, and author Terry Goodkind are all Dvorak users.

The world record for fastest typing of the English language was set by writer Barbara Blackburn in 2005. She managed to pound out 150 words per minute for 50 minutes, and even clocked a blistering 212-wpm in a single short burst. Blackburn, who had failed her QWERTY typing class in high school, accomplished these feats using a Dvorak Simplified Keyboard.