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Standard typewriter keyboard8/19/2023 ![]() So why didn't we all switch to Dvorak? The problem lay in coordinating the switch. Training typists to use the Dvorak layout would pay for itself many times over. Navy conducted a study in the 1940s, demonstrating that the Dvorak was vastly superior. Left- and right-hand layouts are available. And that's a shame because more logical layouts exist notably, the Dvorak, designed by August Dvorak and patented in 1932. These things have a momentum of their own. Nobody then was thinking about our interests today. Yet this brief struggle for market dominance in 1880s America determines the layout of the keyboard on an iPad. Sholes has been described as the 52nd man to invent the typewriter, but the QWERTY keyboard emerged victorious. Sholes' design was taken up by the gunsmiths E. Why do we still use it? The simple answer is that QWERTY won a battle for dominance in the 1880s. The QWERTY layout was designed for the convenience of telegraph operators transcribing Morse code. The father of the QWERTY keyboard, Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer from Wisconsin, sold his first typewriter in 1868 to Edward Payson Porter of Porter's Telegraph College, Chicago, which gives a clue as to what was going on. Then again, if QWERTY really was designed to be slow, how come the most popular pair of letters in English - T, H - are adjacent and right under the index fingers? The plot thickens. And at such a speed, the typist might need to be slowed down for the sake of the typewriter. HARFORD: Typing at 60 words a minute - no stretch for a good typist - means five or six letters striking the same spot each second. And a professional typist might just run into that problem. For a professional typist, the results would leave something to be desired. I discovered through impish trial and error that if I hit several keys at once, the type bars all flew up at the same time into the same spot, like two or three golfers all trying to strike the same ball. On the end of the lever - called a typed bar - would be a pair of reverse letters in relief. And when I did, a lever would flick up from behind the keyboard - a tiny golf club of a thing that would whack hard against an inked ribbon, squeezing that ink against a sheet of paper. HARFORD: I'd bang down on a key - not easy for little fingers. In the early 1980s, I persuaded my mother to take down her mechanical typewriter from a high shelf, delighted by this miraculous machine. But let's start by figuring out why anyone might have been perverse enough to want to slow down typists. Could that be true? And why do economists of all people argue about this? It turns out that the stakes here are higher than they might first appear. Many people think that QWERTY is a bad one in fact, that it was deliberately designed to be slow and awkward. ![]() There are good arrangements and bad ones. TIM HARFORD: It matters where the keys sit on your keyboard. GARCIA: Stole with permission, as we like to do here - so it'll be Tim's voice that you hear coming right out of the break. GARCIA: So for today's episode of THE INDICATOR, we kind of just stole one of Tim's podcast episodes. ![]() And a great person to tell us the story is our own Tim Harford, an old friend of the show who just launched Season 2 of his own podcast, 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy. And it turns out that there are some important economic lessons in the story of the QWERTY keyboard, the story of why it originally became the standard keyboard way back in the late 1800s and the story of why it has remained the standard keyboard for all the time since. VANEK SMITH: I've been using a QWERTY keyboard for a long time now, Cardiff (laughter). But what is it about this arrangement of letters that explains why practically every keyboard uses it? Everyone types on a QWERTY keyboard, you know, where the first six letters across the top of the keyboard are Q, W, E, R, T, Y - QWERTY.
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