Faster Typewriter

More than ten years ago Dr. August Dvorak (no relative of Composer Dvorak), a professor of education at University of Washington, invented a new typewriter keyboard which he proved was faster and less fatiguing than the old standard keyboard designed in 1868 (see cut). But so far only 1,000 machines with the Dvorak keyboard (available from most typewriter manufacturers) have been sold. Dr. Dvorak had about despaired of teaching old typists new tricks when last week University of Chicago reported remarkable success in teaching the Dvorak system to children.

In the University's demonstration elementary school, pupils are taught typewriting from grades five to eight as a means of improving their English, spelling and com position. Teachers announced that children learned typing twice as fast on the Dvorak keyboard, were able to exceed 50 correct words a minute (par for professional: 70 words).

Dr. Dvorak concluded that the old keyboard needed reforming when he found that high-school typists often misspelled easy words (such as "on," "which") because they had to make awkward reaches and hurdles with their fingers to type them. He also found that in normal writing typists struck keys in the home row (second from the bottom, where the fingers naturally rest) only 32% of the time, that the left hand did 47% more work than the right. Sample one-hand word: greatest.

In the simplified Dvorak keyboard, all the vowels and punctuation marks are struck by the left hand, the most frequently used consonants by the right. Thus no word or syllable can be written by the right hand alone, very few by the left alone. Moreover, 70% of a typist's strokes are on the home row. Dr. Dvorak claims that university students can attain 50 words a minute in one semester on his keyboard (months sooner than on the standard keyboard), that misspellings decrease. Last week the Chicago results gave him new hope.

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