YESTERDAY, THIS ALL STARTED WITH a Smithsonian Magazine article on QWERTY. Today, we continue gleaning tidbits from Ellen Wexler’s article.
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A Non-Jamming Theory. Ellen Wexler recounts, “In a 2011 paper, Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka, researchers at Kyoto University, tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users. They concluded that the mechanics of the typewriter didn’t influence the keyboard design. Instead, the QWERTY system emerged in response to one group of early users: telegraph operators who needed to quickly transcribe messages. These operators found the alphabetical arrangement to be confusing and inefficient for translating Morse code.”
The researchers wrote, “The speed of Morse receiver should be equal to the Morse sender, of course. If Sholes really arranged the keyboard to slow down the operator, the operator became unable to catch up the Morse sender. We don’t believe that Sholes had such a nonsense intention during his development of [the] typewriter.”
Hence, QWERTY, once learned, optimized this sender/receiver interaction.
The Dvorak. A QWERTY competitor from the 1930s, the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, conjectured that putting commonly used letters all on the keyboard’s “home row” would optimize operation.
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A Dvorak keyboard. Image from Smithsonian.
Wexler writes er… likely types, “Some research showed that Dvorak users reported improved speed and accuracy—though much of that testing was funded by Dvorak—and other research has since suggested that Dvorak isn’t more efficient…. While Dvorak certainly had its champions, it never gained enough of a following to overthrow King QWERTY.”
I’m All Thumbs…. Enter, the KALQ system as a modern QWERTY competitor: It’s designed to optimize typing with one’s thumbs, as the kids do so readily on smartphones. Wikipedia recounts, “The KALQ keyboard (dubbed after the order the keys appear in the keyboard, analogous to QWERTY) is a keyboard layout that has been developed by researchers at the Montana Tech, University of St Andrews and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics as a split-screen keyboard for thumb-typing, which is claimed to allow a 34% increase in speed of typing for the people who use touchscreen.”
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Image from Apkpure.
Wikipedia continues, “KALQ was released as a free app, albeit a beta, for Android-based smartphones. Although the KALQ project received some buzz in tech media, as of early 2017, the latest public version is dated October 2013, and still labelled a beta.”
Alas, I would be hopelessly inept. I do my Apple phone typing with a hunt-and-peck index finger; its pattern is QWERTY. ds
© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025
