Confirming that straightforward prediction, motion-picture studies prove that typing is fastest on the home row and slowest on the bottom row. Obviously, the more typing you can do without having to move your fingers from the home row, the faster you’ll be able to type, the fewer errors you’ll make, and the less you’ll strain your fingers. When you prepare to type, you rest your fingers on QWERTY’s second-from-the-bottom row, called the home row. Applied to keyboard design, such studies showed that typing fatigue, errors, and slow speed depend especially on bad design in allocating letters among keyboard rows, among fingers, and between the left and right hands. The Gilbreths sought to decrease worker fatigue and increase the efficiency of many industrial processes (as well as of surgical operations and buttoning a shirt) by time-and-motion studies and slowed-down motion pictures. Studies of the consequences of keyboard design were pioneered by the industrial engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, who were made famous by a biography, Cheaper by the Dozen, written by 2 of their 12 children. Hence we can ask, with the expectation of finding an answer, to what advantages does it owe its triumph? We know that QWERTY is the dominant survivor of dozens of keyboard designs that competed during the early years of the typewriter. But the QWERTY keyboard is a modern-day commitment, dating back only to the late nineteenth century, and thus it is one whose history we can reconstruct. Those questions are hard to answer for some of these choices- counting systems, for instance-to which we became committed in the remote past. Were some of these alternatives better than others? Did we in fact end up committed to the best ones? Are our alphabets, decimal counting, Arabic numerals, and Gregorian calendar really superior to Chinese logograms, Babylonian base-60 counting, Roman numerals, and the Mayan calendar? At one time there existed alternatives to the system that we eventually adopted. All human societies have many apparently arbitrary practices that persist for centuries or even millennia-writing systems, counting systems, sets of number signs, and calendars, to name just a few examples. All of us have at one time or another felt trapped by such a commitment, longing for a happier, though uncertain, state of existence but fearing the short-term pain required to reach it.Commitment is a big issue not only for us as individuals, but for us as a culture as well. Often, commitment can mean nothing more than an involvement that has outlived its original justification. After all, what one is committed to might be either good or bad commitment to a destructive relationship, an unsatisfying job, or alcoholism deserves no praise. Yet commitment should be seen as morally neutral. Commitment to our spouses, our children, and our careers is held to be virtuous lack of commitment is a common criticism. The typewriter, and its successor the computer, are among the most widely used office machines in the Western world, and keyboard-related repetitive-strain injuries are among our most common industrial accidents.Ĭommitment is incessantly urged upon us fin de siècle twentieth- century Americans. Whatever the original reasons for our adopting QWERTY, however, we now seem firmly committed to it. At age ten I, like millions of Americans each year, memorized the QWERTY keyboard (as it is called from its starting arrangement of letters).Īt the time, I didn’t wonder about its arbitrariness and never asked myself why our standard keyboard uses the QWERTY arrangement instead of alphabetical order or any other obviously advantageous arrangement. So when the chicken pox forced me to stay home from school for two weeks, I used the time to learn touch typing. But it was even more boring to lie in bed and do nothing. It was boring to type the letters in the upper row of my typewriter keyboard 20 times, then go on to the next row. Q - w - e - r - t, y - u - i - o - p, q - w - e - r - t, y - u - i - o - p, q - w - e - r - t, y - u - i - o - p.
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