For one thing, QWERTY enjoyed a head start, as the keyboard layout of the first commercially successful typewriter. That success, however, was due not so much to the layout as to the many other advantageous components that Sholes added, such as type bars, an inked ribbon, and a cylindrical paper carriage. Those inventions helped Remington remain one of the leading typewriter manufacturers, and the company continued to use QWERTY even as its typewriters evolved in other respects.
QWERTY gained another undeserved advantage around 1893, when Underwood, Remington’s chief rival, introduced a typewriter with two big virtues: visible typing on the front side of the paper, and a component called an accelerating sublever that permitted faster speed. Those features helped propel the Underwood Model No. 5 to the status of the most long- lived and widely sold office standard typewriter. Underwood happened to use the QWERTY keyboard.
QWERTY’s early dominance meant that typewriter users became committed to the layout. From 1874 until 1881, the only typewriters commercially available were Remington machines with QWERTY keyboards, and typists learned to use them. Some of those typists set up typing schools, where they taught the QWERTY keyboard familiar to them. Their pupils took jobs at offices with the keyboards they knew. Many businesses newly equipping themselves with typewriters ordered QWERTY machines, because it was easy to find typists trained to operate them.
Nevertheless, QWERTY’s apotheosis came slowly. As of 1900, many typewriter engineers still disliked shift keys. But touch typing was prohibitively difficult with the alternative--a double keyboard with eight or nine rows of keys and separate keys dedicated to uppercase and lowercase letters. As touch typing gradually became the norm, sales of double- keyboard machines declined; the last model was discontinued in 1921.
The infinitely superior Dvorak keyboard is named for August Dvorak, a professor of education at the University of Washington in Seattle and a distant cousin of the famous Czech composer Antonin Dvo?rák. Around 1914, August’s brother-in-law William Dealey attended some industrial efficiency seminars led by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, watched their slow- motion films of typists, and reported what he saw to Dvorak. The brothers- in-law then devoted almost two decades to enormously detailed studies of typing, typists’ errors, previously designed keyboards, hand physiology and function, and the relative frequencies of letters, pairs of letters, and words in English. Finally, in 1932, they took what they had learned and designed a new keyboard.
Dvorak typists began to sweep typing speed contests two years later, and they have held most typing records ever since. A large-scale comparative test of several thousand children, carried out in the Tacoma schools in the 1930s, showed that children learned Dvorak typing in one- third the time required to attain the same standard with QWERTY typing. When the U.S. Navy faced a shortage of trained typists in World War II, it experimented with retraining QWERTY typists to use Dvorak. The retraining quickly enabled the Navy’s test typists to increase their typing accuracy by 68 percent and their speed by 74 percent. Faced with these convincing results, the Navy ordered thousands of Dvorak typewriters.
They never got them. The Treasury Department vetoed the Navy purchase order, probably for the same reason that has blocked acceptance of all improved, non-QWERTY keyboards for the last 80 years: the commitment to QWERTY of tens of millions of typists, teachers, salespeople, office managers, and manufacturers. Even when daisy wheels and computer printers replaced type bars, forever banishing the jamming problem that had originally motivated QWERTY, manufacturers of the efficient new technologies carried on the inefficient old keyboard. August Dvorak died in 1975, a bitter man: I’m tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race, he complained. They simply don’t want to change!
QWERTY’s saga illustrates a much broader phenomenon: how commitment shapes the history of technology and culture, often selecting which innovations become entrenched and which are rejected. In the nineteenth-century United States, for example, those who profited from canals, barges, stagecoaches, and the pony express resisted the construction of railroads; in England, electric street lighting spread slowly, partly because of opposition from local governments with heavy investments in gas lighting. Even today, commitment influences railroad gauges and television technology, and whether we mark our rulers with centimeters or inches and drive on the right or the left.
