The Dvorak keyboard moved most typing onto the home row
On a standard QWERTY keyboard, only about a third of keystrokes land on the home row where your fingers rest; more than half go to the row above. August Dvorak rearranged the letters so that about 70 percent of typing happens on the home row. Yet decades of experiments never settled whether that makes anyone faster.
Dvorak was an educational psychologist at the University of Washington who got interested in keyboards while advising a student writing a thesis on typing errors. With his brother-in-law William Dealey, who had attended seminars on the science of motion, he studied letter frequencies, the anatomy of the hand and slow-motion films of typists. They finished the design in 1932 and patented it in 1936, more than sixty years after QWERTY appeared in 1874.
The rules were simple. Hands should alternate, so vowels sit on the left and the commonest consonants on the right. The most frequent letters go under the strongest fingers, the rarest on the awkward bottom row, and the right hand does more work because most people are right-handed. Strokes should flow from the edge of the keyboard toward the middle, just as tapping from little finger to index feels easier than the reverse. The home row reads AOEUIDHTNS, close to one George Blickensderfer used on an 1893 typewriter.
Early results looked promising. In the 1930s a Tacoma school district taught 2,700 high school students on Dvorak and found they learned it in a third of the time QWERTY took, though a new school board cancelled the classes. Dvorak's Navy tests during the Second World War claimed typists could switch in 10 days, but he set aside at least two earlier studies whose results are unknown.
In the 1950s the General Services Administration asked Earle Strong to check. His controlled study found no benefit, and retraining took 100 hours, though Strong had publicly opposed new keyboard designs beforehand. Later work suggests many layouts give similar speeds once typists are trained. Dvorak still inspired Colemak, the German Neo and the French BÉPO, and it ships with every major operating system.
Source: Dvorak keyboard layout
