I was sitting through a completely unrelated training session today when the trainer brought up the supposed benefits of the Dvorak keyboard over the familiar QWERTY arrangement. Ugh. Unfounded statements ensued.
For the record,
1. The QWERTY arrangement was not designed to slow typists down. In fact, QWERTY was an attempt to get the fastest possible speed out of a mechanical typewriter. Common letter combinations were placed in such a way that they wouldn’t cause clashes inside the typewriter, allowing typists to maximize their speed.
2. Dvorak’s advantage is marginal at best. People like to cite very large efficiency increases — the number tossed around at the training session was 70 percent more efficient. But most of those claims come from studies carried out by … wait for it … August Dvorak and various advocates of the Dvorak keyboard. Other, independent studies, have suggested small or non-existent improvements from switching to Dvorak, but these studies also tend to have problems and there’s a real issue of just how you measure the differing efficiency without taking a large group of non-typists and randomly train half of them in one method and half of them in another.
However, given the claims made for the keyboard by its supporters, it is odd that clear, convincing evidence for its superiority is so hard to come by.
3. Dvorak has some genuine insanity. Specifically, the number keys are not in numerical order. Rather than the QWERTY layout of 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-0, QWERTY layout is 7-5-3-1-9-0-2-4-6-8. Ugh. That’s such a bad idea that even ANSI went with a numerical order for numbers when it approved the Dvorak keyboard as an alternate standard in 1982.
4. The success of QWERTY is almost certain not an example of a pure network effect. This is the view, cited by some economists, that certain goods and services are successful even when they are inferior to other goods simply because pre-existing standards impose a cost on selecting the superior good. With QWERTY, for example, it is claimed that QWERTY is the dominant keyboard configuration largely because it has been dominant for so long — i.e. that once a product reaches a certain level of dominance, its success becomes self-perpetuating. This would be a fascinating instance of market failure if it were true.
One of the things Liebowitz and Margolis noted in their classic (and hotly debated), The Fable of the Keys, however, is that QWERTY’s dominance is a direct result of its performance,
Remington’s early commercial rivals were numerous, offered substantial variations on the typewriter, and in some cases enjoyed moderate success. There were plenty of competitors after the Sholes machine came to market. The largest and most important of these rivals were the Hall, Caligraph, and Crandall machines. The Yost, another double-keyboard machine, manufactured by an early collaborator of Sholes, used a different inking system and was known particularly for its attractive type. According to production data assembled by Yamada, the machines were close rivals, and they each sold in large numbers. Franz Xavier Wagner, who also worked on the I873 Remington typewriter, developed a machine that made the type fully visible as it was being typed. This machine was offered to, but rejected by, the Union Typewriter Company, the company formed by the 1893 merger of Remington with six other typewriter manufacturers. In 1895, Wagner joined John T. Underwood to produce his machine. Their company, which later became Underwood, enjoyed rapid growth, producing two hundred typewriters per week by 1898. Wagner’s offer to Union also resulted in the spin-off from Union of L. C. Smith, who introduced a visible-type machine in 1904. This firm was the forerunner of the Smith-Corona company.
Two manufacturers offered their own versions of an ideal keyboard: Hammond in 1893 and Blickensderfer in 1889. Each of these machines survived for a time, and each had certain mechanical advantages. Blickensderfer later produced what may have been the first portable and the first electric typewriters. Hammond later produced the Varityper, a standard office type-composing machine that was the antecedent of today’s desktop publishing. The alternative keyboard machines produced by these manufacturers came early enough that typewriters and, more important, touch-typing were still not very popular. The Blickensderfer appeared within a year of the famous Cincinnati contest that first publicized touch-typing.
In the 1880s and 1890s typewriters were generally sold to offices not already staffed with typists or into markets in which typists were not readily available. Since the sale of a new machine usually meant training a new typist, a manufacturer that chose to compete using an alternative keyboard had an opportunity. As late as 1923, typewriter manufacturers operated placement services for typists and were an important source of operators. In the earliest days, typewriter salesmen provided much of the limited training available to typists. Since almost every sale required the training of a typist, a typewriter manufacturer that offered a different keyboard was not particularly disadvantaged. Manufacturers internalized training costs in such an environment, so a keyboard that allowed more rapid training might have been particularly attractive.
Offering alternative keyboards was not a terribly expensive tactic. The Blickensderfer used a type-bar configuration similar in principle to the IBM Selectric type ball and, so, could easily offer many different configurations. The others could create alternative keyboard arrangements by simply soldering the type to different bars and attaching the keys to different levers. So apparently the problem of implementing the conversion was not what kept the manufacturers from changing keyboards.
The rival keyboards did ultimately fail, of course. But the Qwerty keyboard cannot have been so well established at the time the rival keyboards were first offered that they were rejected because they were non-standard. Manufacturers of typewriters sought and promoted any technical feature that might give them an advantage in the market. Certainly shorter training and greater speed would have been an attractive selling point for a typewriter with an alternative keyboard. Neither can it be said that the rival keyboards were doomed by inferior mechanical characteristics because these companies went on to produce successful and innovative, though Qwerty-based, typing machines. Thus we cannot attribute our inheritance of the Qwerty keyboard to a lack of alternative keyboards or the chance association of this keyboard arrangement with the only mechanically adequate typewriter.
Dvorak’s keyboard layout was finalized in 1932 and patented in 1936.
5. Sometimes change sucks because, well, the change being proposed just sucks. Trainers like the person I sat through tend to use the Dvorak keyboard as an example of how and why people resist change. But part of the reason people resist change is that sometimes the proposed change sucks and simply shouldn’t be attempted.
Trying to switch everyone over to Dvorak keyboards at a company would be a Really Bad Idea. It would cause immense disruption and incur high training costs for a benefit that in the end would likely be marginal at best.