Marcin Wichary December 2023 / 8,000 words / 33 photos
The primitive tortureboard
Untangling the myths and mysteries of Dvorak and QWERTY
This essay was originally published in December 2023 as sixth chapter of the book Shift Happens.
1
There weren’t many who hated QWERTY more. To his credit, there was a lot to hate. The layout seemed random, with letters strewn around without rhyme or reason. Watching someone type on it felt painful: fingers flailed wildly all over the place, common letters far away from the home row necessitated more travel, and there were long stretches of one hand doing all the work while the other sat idle. Adding insult to injury, it wasn’t even really that difficult to spot someone using a QWERTY-wearing typewriter. The layout was already so ubiquitous, it was known as “the universal keyboard.”
But he felt it didn’t deserve to be. “It would be difficult to design a key-board over which the hands must travel farther,” he said. There was nothing smart about it; QWERTY “was not arranged on any principle, but resulted from the necessity of humoring the construction of the early machine.” He wanted to build a principled keyboard instead.
Eventually, after much deliberation, he did so. He arranged the most common letters in one row, so the hands didn’t have to leave it except for rarer letters, which represented only 30% of characters typed: “The hands travel over the least possible distance. Almost all word endings are close to the spacebar.” Switching to the new keyboard would save 15% of typing time, and the training wouldn’t take long. The keyboard “can be memorized and high speed attained on it in one-quarter the time required for the Universal.”
It was a great keyboard with a great layout. He could’ve called it by his name – George C. Blickensderfer – but he had a better one. If the other keyboard was Universal, his would be Scientific.
The Scientific keyboard was unveiled in 1893 at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, attached to a few brand-new typewriters. Those were named after him. Blickensderfer Model 1 was the fully featured model, with some other interesting ideas: an implement for easier line-drawing, automatic word spacing, and extra keys like The, And, and Other that output short words. There was a simpler version, the Model 3, and even the tiny Model 5 had a few interesting features: instead of swinging typebars, it had a type wheel that would rotate when a typist pressed keys. The wheel could be swapped out, which meant you could easily type in many different fonts, and in many different languages.
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