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From: Malcolm Davidson <mdavidso@ccmail.crosscomm.com>
Date: September, 1996

Here's the claim:

The keyboard arrangement commonly used today (called QWERTY for obvious reasons) was developed a long time ago by an early typewriter company. The company had been having trouble with keyboards jamming because people typed too fast. Instead of making unjammable keyboards, the company came out with a purposely inefficient arrangement that would slow typists enough to prevent jamming. Unfortunately, despite the subsequent development of practically unjammable keyboards, we are still stuck with the inefficient QWERTY keyboard arrangement. Attempts to replace QWERTY with better arrangements have failed because once a standard is in place, it is too hard to get people to abandon their investment in time and equipment and to relearn a more sensible standard. The most often touted alternative to QWERTY is the Dvorak keyboard, named for its developer. Tests by the US Navy and others prove the ergonomic and financial superiority of the Dvorak keyboard, but no one will listen.

Well, the claim is old but apparently it still has plenty of proponents. For example, MIT's Technology Review (July 1996) published an article by David Tenenbaum that cites the Navy study and other research supporting the Dvorak keyboard:

"Despite his scientific approach, professor Dvorak clearly failed to calculate the staying power of a system entrenched in both hardware and the human skull. By the time he introduced his layout, QWERTY had already stood as the standard for half a century. And the Dvorak layout, for all its advantages, could not gain a credible market share."

But an article in Reason (June 1996) seems to demolish the claim. In it, Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis tell us that the Navy study is questionable, and they reveal that "the Navy's top expert in the analysis of time and motion studies during World War II was none other than...drum roll please...Lieut. Com. August Dvorak," the patent holder for the Dvorak keyboard in question, and that Dvorak himself conducted the Navy experiment so often cited. Liebowitz and Margolis cite subsequent studies that indicated no need to switch to the Dvorak keyboard. They conclude:

"The QWERTY keyboard cannot be said to constitute evidence of any systematic tendency for markets to err. Very simply, no competing keyboard has offered enough advantage to warrant a change. The story of Dvorak's superiority is a myth or, perhaps more properly, a hoax."

Liebowitz and Margolis convinced me, but judge for yourself:

The Reason article is at:
http://www.reasonmag.com/9606/Fe.QWERTY.html

The Technology Review article is at:
http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena/org/t/techreview/www/articles/july96/trends.html

Both articles have jumps for people who want more information.