Economists are interested in market failures. The QWERTY keyboard is supposed to be one such:
The myth goes roughly as follows. The QWERTY design (patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873) aimed to solve a mechanical problem of early typewriters. When certain combinations of keys were struck quickly, the type bars often jammed. To avoid this, the QWERTY layout put the keys most likely to be hit in rapid succession on opposite sides. This made the keyboard slow, the story goes, but that was the idea. A different layout, which had been patented by August Dvorak in 1936, was shown to be much faster. 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. Why has the bad design endured? Because, the story continues, that first inefficient standard became locked in. Even though the costs of new keyboards and retraining for the Dvorak layout would be quickly recovered, typists won’t switch unless others do so as well; likewise, the keyboard manufacturers refuse to move first. There is a co-ordination failure—that is, a market failure. A fine tale, but largely fiction. ... (Since 1956) there have been a variety of ... experiments and studies. They find that neither design of keyboard has a clear advantage over the other. Ergonomists point out that QWERTY’s bad points (such as unbalanced loads on left and right hand; excess loading on the top row) are outweighed by presumably accidental benefits (notably, that alternating hand sequences make for speedier typing). ... if you have learned to type on a QWERTY keyboard, the cost of retraining for Dvorak (however modest) is not worth paying. This implies, in turn, that the QWERTY standard is efficient. There is no market failure. The Independent Institute
This short piece deals swiftly with the 1994 US Navy experiment that compared the two types of keyboard: 'The speed of 14 typists retrained on Dvorak was compared with the speed of 18 given supplementary training on QWERTY. The Dvorak typists did better—but it is impossible to say from the official report whether the experiment was properly controlled. There are a variety of oddities and possible biases: all of them, it so happens, seeming to favour Dvorak. But then it turns out—something else the report forgot to mention—that the experiments were conducted by one Lieutenant-Commander August Dvorak, the navy’s top time-and-motion man, and owner of the Dvorak layout patent.'
