Union County before the QWERTY tyranny

The Caligraph's non-QWERTY keyboard

The Ledger recently reported on the discovery -- rediscovery, actually -- of a circa-1882 Caligraph. The early typewriter, the third marketed in the United States, was used in Union County courts by Charles Addison Swift, who obtained it while serving as clerk of the grand jury in the 1880s.

The story concerns the misadventures of the historic machine, which will now be displayed in the grand jury room in the County Courthouse in Elizabeth.

What interests me is the keyboard, which features separate keys for upper- and lower-case letters and is definitely not the QWERTY arrangement to which we are accustomed today.

The story, though, is only partly correct in asserting QWERTY was developed because keys in other configurations jammed.

The keys jammed because typists were able to type faster than the primitive mechanisms' keys could recover to their starting position, hence the jamming.

The QWERTY arrangement was arrived at just exactly because the awkward placement of the most-used keys -- splitting them up -- slowed typists down and reduced the jamming problem.

But the idea of non-QWERTY machines, on which typists could whiz along, never really went away. In 1936, an alternative layout was patented by Dr. August Dvorak, who taught at the University of Washington.

As the Wikipedia article points out --

Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of people’s hands and created a layout to adhere to these principles:

• It is easier to type letters alternating between hands.
• For maximum speed and efficiency, the most common letters and digraphs should be the easiest to type. This means that they should be on the home row, which is where the fingers rest, and under the strongest fingers.
• The least common letters should be on the bottom row, which is the hardest row to reach.
• The right hand should do more of the typing, because most people are right-handed.
• It is more difficult to type digraphs with adjacent fingers than non-adjacent fingers.
• Stroking should generally move from the edges of the board to the middle. An observation of this principle is that, for many people, when tapping fingers on a table, it is easier going from little finger to index than vice versa.
  

What many people do not know is that most of today's computers are set up to allow the user to reprogram the keyboard layout to conform with the Dvorak pattern. The key covers, which can easily be snapped off, can then be reapplied to reflect the new keyboard arrangement.

Check out the Microsoft tutorial here.

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More information --

• Ledger: "Innovation made local history in the write way"
• Typewriter Museum: "The Virtual Typewriter Museum"
• Microsoft: "Alternative Keyboard Layouts"
• Keyboard Tutorial: "Introducing the Dvorak Keyboard"
  

-- Dan Damon

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