Unfortunately this particular typewriter was “silent” (it did not make the typical click-clack noises whilst typing) and did not sell well because many typists disliked this aspect. Dvorak invested heavily in producing a Remington typewriter featuring his layout. Even today, the fastest known typing speed was recorded in the 1940’s using the Dvorak Layout-212 words per minute (wpm) burst speed and 150 wpm sustained over 50 minutes. These typists were so successful that the Dvorak layout was eventually barred from all the competitions. As proof that his format was superior, Dvorak trained up some typists at the Navy base where he worked and sent these typists around to various typing competitions. Sholes’s final layout was never included in any manufactured typewriting machines. Even Sholes was not happy with his original QWERTY layout, and in his final typewriter patent he included a new layout that has striking similarities to the Dvorak layout-it places all the vowels on one row and under one hand (see Figure 5). The Dvorak layout can be seen in Figure 4. He patented his own format, the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (also known as DSK or Dvorak) layout, which placed popular letters like t, h and e directly under the typist’s fingers. Dvorak believed that the QWERTY format was not optimal because it did not place the popular letter pairs in easily accessible positions. published Typing Behavior, a book cata- loging an 11 year study into keyboard layouts. These lessons helped transition typists from a hunt-and-peck technique through to touch typing and by the early 1900’s typists were typing faster than ever before. To solve the problem of slow typists, regimented lessons were introduced. Over time some minor improvements were made to the layout, until it finally became a standard layout (as seen in Figure 3). The introduction of QWERTY had the side effect of slowing typists down because the keys were no longer laid out as intuitively as before.

The new layout was designed to place popular letter pairs onto opposite hands in order to reduce the occurrence of jamming. Sholes continued to make improvements to his typewriting machine and eventually patented the QWERTY layout in 1878 (see Figure 2). Because the key hammers were not spring-loaded and required gravity to return to their rest position, the hammers frequently jammed when two neighbouring keys were pressed in quick succession. The modern typewriter, invented in 1868 by Christopher Sholes, also had an alphabetical layout (see Figure 1). The typewriter was first invented in the early 1800s and the keyboard was laid out in alphabetical order with piano-like keys. Finally some conclusions are drawn in Section 5 and future work is discussed in Section 6. Section 3 describes the design of the experiments and Section 4 gives the results of the experiments. The next section in this paper describes the history of the two formats. The work in this paper resulted from experimentation of building profiles based on finger movement instead of absolute times. The PhD is mainly focused on implementa- tion of machine learning techniques to process typing recordings into profiles of users. This paper is related to, but not part of, the main goal of the PhD: typist recognition. Whilst the cognitive difficulties associated with text entry are ignored in this paper because they are largely irrelevant with regards to keyboard layout, these difficulties can be used to identify a computer user. The research conducted in this paper is part of a PhD research project on identifying a typist by the way they type. This paper investigates which layout is the most efficient for text entry on a keyboard. Academic writing seems to point to QWERTY and Dvorak reaching a draw equal numbers of papers exist in favour of each format. The question of which keyboard format is optimal still rages on. Although not universally accepted, the most commonly cited reason that QWERTY is so popular is because such an overwhelming market share was gained by QWERTY keyboards that it was unprofitable to continue making Dvorak ones. One might surmise the win- ner to be QWERTY because this is virtually the only keyboard layout available for purchase today. the beginning of the 20th Century a battle has quietly been fought over the optimal layout of alphanumeric keys on a keyboard.

Who invented typewriter keyboard