![typewriter keyboard design typewriter keyboard design](https://images.theconversation.com/files/271229/original/file-20190427-194637-75anov.jpg)
They find that neither design of keyboard has a clear advantage over the other. Since then, as The Fable of the Keys explains, there have been a variety of other experiments and studies. Interest in Dvorak among companies and government agencies had lately been increasing, but it came to an end with that finding. In 1956 a carefully designed study by the General Services Administration found that QWERTY typists were about as fast as Dvorak typists, or faster. There are a variety of oddities and possible biases: all of them, it so happens, seeming to favour Dvorak.īut then it turns outsomething else the report forgot to mentionthat the experiments were conducted by one Lieutenant-Commander August Dvorak, the navys top time-and-motion man, and owner of the Dvorak layout patent.
![typewriter keyboard design typewriter keyboard design](https://i.imgur.com/zfdsSoE.jpg)
The Dvorak typists did betterbut it is impossible to say from the official report whether the experiment was properly controlled. The speed of 14 typists retrained on Dvorak was compared with the speed of 18 given supplementary training on QWERTY. The main study was carried out by the United States Navy in 1944 (doubtless a time when every second counted in the typing pools). The paper by Messrs Liebowitz and Margolis shows, in the first place, that the first evidence supporting claims of Dvoraks superiority was extremely thin. Carriage returnĪ fine tale, but largely fiction. There is a co-ordination failurethat is, a market failure. Even though the costs of new keyboards and retraining for the Dvorak layout would be quickly recovered, typists wont switch unless others do so as well likewise, the keyboard manufacturers refuse to move first. Why has the bad design endured? Because, the story continues, that first inefficient standard became locked in. Yet the Dvorak layout has never been widely adopted, even though (with electric typewriters and then PCs) the anti-jamming rationale for QWERTY has been defunct for years. A different layout, which had been patented by August Dvorak in 1936, was shown to be much faster. This made the keyboard slow, the story goes, but that was the idea. To avoid this, the QWERTY layout put the keys most likely to be hit in rapid succession on opposite sides. When certain combinations of keys were struck quickly, the type bars often jammed. The QWERTY design (patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873) aimed to solve a mechanical problem of early typewriters. It tells you plenty about the history of the typewriterbut what every economist should have concluded from it was that another example of locking in had better be found. That is why the paper on QWERTY published a mere nine years ago by Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas at Dallas and Stephen Margolis of the University of California, Los Angeles, was called The Fable of the Keys. Mr Cheungs article was called The Fable of the Bees. He found that apple-growers paid beekeepers for their bees pollinating endeavours those services were not, in fact, an unpriced externality. At about the same time Steven Cheung examined beekeeping and apple-growing in the state of Washington. So lighthouses are not pure public goods. More than 25 years ago, Ronald Coase, a Nobel laureate, showed that when lighthouses were first built in Britain they were provided by private enterprise tolls were collected when ships reached port. Which is only apt, because the tale of QWERTY is a mythjust like those other two cases. In its field, QWERTY has achieved the same iconic eminence. If you needed a case of positive externalities (yet another), you would very likely go for beekeeping. For years, if you cited an example of a pure public good (another kind of market failure), it had to be a lighthouse. Many a textbook cites this case as proof of a certain kind of market failurethat associated with the adoption and locking-in of a bad standard. It may have been the millionth such reference. Yet the charges against QWERTY were long ago disproved.Īt a conference attended the other day by your reporter, a distinguished academic economist (who had better remain nameless) cited the QWERTY layout of the standard typewriter keyboard as a clear example of how markets can make mistakes.
![typewriter keyboard design typewriter keyboard design](https://media.stockinthechannel.com/pic/O0iSzBnGmESkUBNZukGGIQ.c-r.jpg)
The dogged persistence of the standard typewriter keyboard, held to be a technological anachronism, is a great favourite. Single Issues of The Independent ReviewĮconomists adore a nice case of market failure.International Economics and Development.