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.
