![]() ![]() Now 64 years old, she has made a living at a typewriter ever since. Within a year she was exceeding 90 words a minute. “After I did so poorly with typing in high school, I went to a business college in Kansas City,” Blackburn said here last week while en route to the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.Īs an experiment, a couple of typewriters at the college had been converted to a new keyboard, and the student figured she had nothing to lose by trying to learn on one of them. The one-time problem student has become granny with the fast fingers. In 1975, the year that Dvorak died, one of his disciples made her first appearance in the Guinness book. “Only two are still in any significant use.” “I went to the patent office and found that about 275 typewriter keyboards have been patented since 1870,” Russell said. Owners such as executives having to use a keyboard for the first time are finding the Dvorak one easier to learn and more productive to use, Russell said. (If the typist chooses to do so, he or she can move interchangeable caps on the individual keys so that the letter corresponds to what is actually being typed.) Little did the originator realize that years down the road was mass popularity of personal computers: With some of these, the flick of a switch can change the keyboard from the QWERTY to the Dvorak system. ![]() Supporters of the alternate keyboard maintain that whereas it takes more than 50 hours of studying QWERTY to reach 40 words a minute (roughly 60 words per minute is required to become a secretary in most offices), it takes only 18 hours to attain 40 words a minute via Dvorak. “Not only that, but we took 200,000 names from the Blue Cross-Blue Shield rolls and discovered that roughly the same percentages applied.” “This means that 70% of the words regularly used in English can be typed on Dvorak’s home row, compared with 32% on QWERTY. “Ten of the 13 most commonly used letters in the English language are on the home row of Dvorak, as opposed to three on the home row of the other system,” Russell said. On the home row, where the typist’s fingers are positioned, the left hand rests on the vowels A-O-E-U-I and the right hand on the frequently used consonants D-H-T-N-S. Until recently what they came up with as a result of their studies ranked right up there with Newton and his figs.īut the logic of the unconventional keyboard is flawless. “The teacher suggested to them that they look into the typewriter keyboard as it related to frequency of letter usage in the English language.”ĭvorak, a professor of education at the University of Washington, and Dealey, a professor of education at North Texas State University, got a grant from the Carnegie Foundation. “In the early 1930s, however, August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, William Dealey, took a statistics course at Brown University,” Russell said. Remington & Sons had put the word machine on the market, QWERTY was well entrenched as the keyboard to be taught. “Sholes developed about 25 alternate keyboards, but the one that caught on was QWERTY, which tended to lessen key-sticking.”īy the time touch-typing came on the scene decades later, after gun manufacturer E. And if a typist went too fast, the keys stuck. “In those days, though, everything was hunt and peck. “The keyboard on their original patent was simply alphabetic,” Russell explained. The most famous one was issued in 1868 to three Milwaukee inventors-Carlos Glidden, Samuel Soule and Christopher Sholes. The first recorded patent of one was to a London engineer in 1714. Typing machines have been around a long time. OK, so what is this desecration of the sacred typing system we all know and love so well? and several of the major insurance companies.” Department of Agriculture, the Social Security Administration, the Ford Motor Co. “But of late I have been dealing with organizations such as the U. “People used to think of us as an Esperanto cult type of thing,” she said, referring to the international language. Russell can make such statements because she is president of the Dvorak International Federation, described as a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting the maverick keyboard. ![]() “The fingers of a Dvorak typist go only one mile.” “Studies have shown that in an eight-hour day the fingers of a QWERTY typist travel 16 miles,” Virginia Russell said by phone from her home in Brandon, Vt. ![]()
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