Since 1714, people from countries such as England, the United States, France, Italy, and Switzerland have successively invented various forms of typewriters, but the technology is not yet mature. The earliest keyboard used on typewriters has also been invented. Until 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes, the father of the typewriter and an American, obtained a patent for a typewriter model and obtained the right to operate it. A few years later, he designed a practical form of modern typewriters and standardized the keyboard for the first time, namely the QWERTY keyboard.
Why standardize the keyboard to a "QWERTY" key layout. This is because initially, the keyboard of a typewriter was arranged in alphabetical order, while a typewriter is a fully mechanical typing tool. If the typing speed is too fast, certain key combinations are prone to key jamming problems. So Christopher Latham Sholes invented the QWERTY keyboard, placing the most commonly used letters in opposite directions to maximize the time interval between repeated keystrokes, thus avoiding stuttering. Scholes applied for a patent in 1868 and successfully launched the first commercial typewriter using this layout in 1873.
The keyboard layout of QWERTY is very inefficient. For example, most typists are right-handed, but when using QWERTY keyboards, their left hand carries 57% of the workload. The two little fingers and the left ring finger are the least powerful fingers, but they are frequently used. The letters listed in the middle column only account for about 30% of the entire typing work. Therefore, it is necessary to frequently move your fingers in order to type a word.
In 1888, a typing competition was held in the United States, and court stenographer Magalin demonstrated his blind typing skills according to clear finger division of labor, with only three out of ten thousand errors, which surprised everyone present. According to records, Magalin's prize money was $500, and since then many people have imitated this type of blind typing. There have also been schools in the United States that specialize in training typists.
Due to the emergence of blind typing technology, the typing speed was sufficient to meet the needs of daily work. However, 60 years later (1934), a person named DVORAK in Washington, USA, invented the arrangement method of the DVORAK keyboard layout to enable his left and right hands to alternately hit more words. This keyboard can shorten the training cycle by half and increase the average speed by 35%. The keyboard layout principles of DVORAK are: 1. Try to alternate left and right hand strikes to avoid single handed combos; 2. The average movement distance of the stroke key is the smallest; 3. The most commonly used letter should be placed at the leading key position.
By the mid-20th century, keyboards had gained another place of use - as the basic input device for computers. However, compared to the DVORAK keyboard layout, QWERTY keyboard is still the most commonly used keyboard layout, which is a very typical example of "inferior products defeating superior products".
