The Case of QWERTY vs. Maltron

Designing a new keyboard is one thing, selling it is another

Italians claim they invented the typewriter in 1855. Austrians say their own Peter Mitterhofer developed the original machine in 1864. Americans are stuck with a trio, Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, who constructed a practical typewriter in 1867. The gap is wide between their early clunker, with wooden type bars that fell back into place because of gravity, and IBM's fanciest $1,035 Selectric III with variable pitch, self-erasure and changeable type balls. But alas, even IBM's latest is burdened by Sholes' greatest yet most troublesome legacy: an eccentric keyboard.

In an attempt to avoid typebar jams, Sholes & Co. arbitrarily dispersed the most frequently used letters--E, T, A, O, N, R, I and S. By 1873, that arrangement had evolved into the current QWERTY keyboard, so named for the first six letters of the upper key row. It was never meant for ease or speed. Touch typing was unheard-of. Early typists (almost all men, called "type-writers") typed with one or two fingers, looking at the keyboards.

And there the typewriter has stayed, with an all but total disregard for the way hands and people are put together. The keyboard favors southpaws by placing most frequently used letters on the left. Thumbs are underused; weak, and less supple, little fingers must shift from upper to lower case. In a day's work, a good typist's fingertips travel twelve to 20 miles.

Nearly half a century ago, August Dvorak, a professor of statistics at the University of Washington, introduced his Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, which groups and centralizes commonly used letters. Typists who mastered it increased their speed, but it never caught on. Dvorak once mused: "If a man makes a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to his door, but Emerson didn't say how long it would take." It took too long for Dvorak: he died in 1975 at 81.

By far the most promising new keyboard is the Maltron, invented by the British team of Lillian Malt, a keyboard training consultant, and Electronics Engineer Stephen Hobday. The Maltron makes letters easier to hit by tilting the keyboard toward normal hand and body positions. More important, it saves time and motion by dividing keys into more efficient groups: 91% of the most often used letters are on the Maltron "home row," where fingertips are normally placed in touch typing, vs. 51% for the QWERTY. Under the Maltron system, hands rarely have to "hurdle" (i.e., jump upward or sideways so fingers can strike keys). In one comparative study of a million words of copying, the typist's hands had to hurdle 82,000 times on the QWERTY board, but only 320 times on the Maltron. Secretaries in a Maltron test sponsored by the British government found it takes about a month to convert to the new system. Most enjoyed it. "Your fingers don't ache," said Julie Stevens, 18, who makes her living copying complex patent applications. The Maltron keyboard's main problem is simple entrenched inertia. Manufacturers all make the QWERTY, and millions of typists around the world know it. So nobody, so far, seems inclined to retool--or become obsolete, even for a month. qed

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