In 6th and 7th grade, I took a typing class. Since it was the 90’s, at least half the class was playing Oregon Trail, but I couldn’t get enough of the 16-bit ‘eat the letter’ game that the every one of those computers also had on it. By the end of the semester I could do 45 words a minute and felt like I had genuinely learned a life skill.

What nobody mentioned was that the keyboard I learned it on was designed in the 1870s to solve a problem that hasn't existed for at least a hundred years.

Turns out, French scientists figured this out in 1926.

A team of psychologists had spent a year hooking typewriters up to smoked drums — recording exactly how fast fingers hit each key, and how long between strokes. What they found: the standard keyboard was actively working against most typists. The letters you use most aren't where your fastest fingers can reach them. The right hand is more agile than the left in most people, but the layout doesn't account for that. They also say that alternating hands for consecutive letters is speedy.

Their recommendation was surprisingly modern: stop imposing one method on everyone. As the article put it

In other words: hunt-and-peck might actually be faster? Maybe not the way I see people 50 years and older typing, but perhaps?

Nobody listened in 1926.

Here's the part most people half-know but never quite have straight. QWERTY wasn't designed to be optimal. It was designed in the 1870s to solve a mechanical problem. Typewriter keys were jamming when commonly paired letters were too close together. The solution was to spread frequently used letters apart, which incidentally slowed typists down enough that the machine could keep up. The machine's problem became your problem. And then it just... stayed.

Alternatives have existed for decades. The Dvorak keyboard, designed in the 1930s, puts the most-used letters on the home row. Since disputed, A 1944 US Navy study retrained typists on Dvorak and found that after just 52 hours they were typing 74 percent faster than their old QWERTY speeds.

More recently, Colemak — a layout that only moves 17 keys from QWERTY — has a devoted following of people who switched and never looked back, most reporting they matched their old speed within a month or two.

None of this matters, of course, because QWERTY got there first. And once something is first, it’s everywhere. It doesn't have to be right anymore. It just has to be familiar.

The French psychologists published their findings. The newspapers ran the story. And then everyone went back to typing the wrong way on the wrong keyboard, exactly as they had before.

A hundred years later you're reading this on a device with a QWERTY keyboard. So am I. And somewhere out there, a hunt-and-peck typist is plodding along nearly as fast as the person who learned it properly.

-Chris

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And for those in your life who don’t read:

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