Why Your Keyboard Is Designed to Slow You Down

hey 42 here for most of human history language was a solely verbal form of communication and whilst we don't know exactly when humans first spoke estimates ranged between 50 and 150 000 years ago we do know that the written word came much later perhaps just five and a half thousand years ago but recent times have seen the invention of a completely new form of communication one that most of us use every single day not the written word but the typed word typing is becoming so ubiquitous in the modern world it's in danger of killing off handwriting altogether cursive that's joined up writing to you and me was removed from the united states core curriculum in 2010 with the ability to use a keyboard and mouse added in its place not long after this decision caused quite a bit of stir at the time plenty of people think joined up writing is a basic life skill but then again when was the last time you wrote a letter in place of an email or text message with the typed word very much here to stay then our keyboards have quietly become some of the most important tools we interact with on a daily basis but as we type out essays and do battle with internet trolls few of us ever bother to consider where the familiar layout of keys that lies beneath our fingertips actually came from or if that layout actually makes any sense so if your typing speed is so slow it's making you miss deadlines obliterating your street cred or bringing shame to your entire family i'm about to tell you exactly who's to blame christopher schultz was a 19th century printer who decided to try his hand at politics it's fair to say he did pretty damn well at it too he served in the wisconsin state legislature where he led the movement to abolish capital punishment in his state and he was eventually appointed by president abraham lincoln himself as collector of the port as in the place ships dock to load cargo not the delicious fortified wine scholes's new role which was to collect import duties didn't just earn him more commission than a toilet roll salesman during a pandemic it freed up his time to do what he loved best invent things scholes had spent much of his life dabbling in inventing but in 1864 he finally secured a patent for a page numbering machine something guaranteed to earn him kudos with other printers then fellow inventor carlos glidden took a look at this machine and made the inspired remark that if it could print numbers why not letters shoals and glidden along with other letter printing enthusiasts immediately set to work in their small milwaukee workshop to create a machine by which a man may print his fort twice as fast as he can write them not a bad endeavor given that people back then were still messing around with inkwells and leaky fountain pens after four long years tackling uncooperative spools rollers and levers the industrial foursome's efforts finally paid off when they secured a patent for what came to be the world's first commercially successful typewriter but it was a very different beast to the one loved by hipsters and eccentric aunties today it looked more like a musical instrument than a writing device with its elongated ivory and ebony keys laid out exactly like those on a piano the letters on those keys were arranged in alphabetical order and like bob marley it was rather partial to jamming presumably shows hoped his customers liked jamming too and judging by the product's early successes it seems they probably did because after shipping out their first piano style typewriter to a mr edward porter of porter's telegraph college in chicago the orders started flooding in but as a quick glance it's the nearest keyboard will tell you the modern day descendants of scholes's typewriter look nothing like pianos and unless you're some kind of sociopath the keys won't be in alphabetical order either so what happened your keys may not be in order but your balls will be when they are shaven and nicely centered with manscape.com who've 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the very fetching manscaped anti-chafing high-performance boxer briefs go to manscape.com today and get 20 off plus free international shipping plus two free gifts when you use the promo code 42 at manscape.com your balls and body will thank you well we know from an article published in scientific american that by 1872 scholes had swapped the keyboard's original layout to the decidedly counter-intuitive arrangement we used today the so-called qwerty system but the million-dollar question is why did he feel the alphabet had seen its best days and was on its way out was the new layout inspired by a particularly heavy night on the opium was he just a bit of a knob the most popular explanation is that shoals had to redesign the keyboard in response to the mechanical failings of those early typewriters if a user quickly hit keys with type bars next to each other the delicate machinery would jam and so scholes needed a way to slow typists down makes sense but this theory is not without its critics if it were correct after all the qwerty system should create the maximum separation of the most common letter pairings in english you'll see from your own keyboard that h and e and a and n are separated but t and h the most common letter pairing of all are fairly close to each other whilst e and r the fourth most common are directly next to each other and here the plot thickens even further scholes's typewriter prototypes had yet another keyboard layout that was only changed immediately before he filed the qwerty patent and if that layout had been put into production i'd be telling you about the cuadoti keyboard in other words one where e and r are not next to each other and where punctuation can be found mixed up amongst the letters this could suggest scholes wanted to slow typist down after all but what caused his last minute change of heart the answer oddly enough lies with firearms manufacturer e remington and sons in one of the more peculiar cases of product diversification remington decided the typewriter cutting-edge technology at the time was the perfect complement to its bread and butter line of rifles and revolvers the man behind this surprising move was remington executive henry benedict who'd received a typewritten letter from scholes and had been so impressed he immediately offered his company's manufacturing expertise which was an especially surprising result given scholes's typewriter could only print capitals at that point so his letter probably came across a little shouty to scholes's delight remington signed a contract to manufacture his machine straight away but then their engineers produced a prototype with a different keyboard layout they'd switched the r key with the full stop scholes was understandably angered by their impudent cheek and demanded the r key be put back in its rightful position remington agreed and released their number one typewriter in 1874. it seems the slow typing theory might still be true at least when it comes to scholes's original intent but for those of you unconvinced here are two alternative theories one is that the keyboard was adapted to suit its very first users remember porter's telegraph college their telegraph operators supposedly found the alphabetical arrangement to be inefficient for translating morse code and so the theory goes qwerty was designed to meet their needs with letters that had similar morse code designations placed closer together another theory is that qwerty derives from a flamboyant sales technique as it would have allowed the remington salespeople to quickly peck out typewriter using only the top row of letters to dazzle potential customers a technique guaranteed to win over the stingiest of technophobes i'm sure you'll agree the theory sort of makes sense and it does seem a little too coincidental that all of the required letters can be found on the top row but unfortunately there's no hard evidence to back this one up one thing we do know is that the qwerty typewriter which initially left buyers unimpressed due to its high cost and tendency to break nonetheless secured its position in the marketplace thanks to a stroke of marketing genius remington decided to offer free or discounted typewriters with their touch typing courses that's basically just typing in 2021 but back then people mostly used a hunt and peck method still favored by grandmas to this day the course helped type is to memorize the position of the keys which allowed for greatly improved typing speeds but here lies the truly ingenious thing about this course the touch typing skills it taught were only ever relevant to qwerty keyboards making it virtually impossible for participants to use a different layout later on remington literally programmed their layout into the brains of their typists creating a kind of qwerty zombie horde who infiltrated private business colleges prestigious universities and even the young women's christian association according to remington at the time and why would they lie moving to a non-qwerty model could cause typists words per minute to go down by as much as 80 percent placing employers in a bit of a tight corner because even if they wanted to buy a different model they'd have to take a huge hit to productivity to do so and that's pretty much how the qwerty typewriter won the battle for dominance in the 1880s by 1890 there were more than 100 000 qwerty keyboards in use in the us alone a well-deserved pat on the back for shoals and remington then but has qwerty remained a good thing for society the short answer is probably not the designs that made life easier for telegraph transcribers and touch typists back then are more or less irrelevant now and several other keyboard layouts have claims to be far more efficient one particularly fierce critic an educational psychologist called august dovrak believed so firmly in the shortcomings of the qwerty design that he had a team of engineers test a whopping 250 keyboard variations and concluded that qwerty was one of the worst arrangements possible harsh words but he backed them up by pointing out many of its letter combinations required awkward finger motions some common combinations had to be typed with the same finger and too much typing was done with the left hand which everyone knows is a tool used only by devil worshipping witches then again dothrak did have what you might call a conflict of interests in 1936 he patented an alternative to quality the dovrak simplified keyboard which he claimed was easier to master faster to use and gentler on the hands the most common letter pairings were typed with alternate hands using the strongest fingers and the right hands did most of the work with such great apparent gains people started to take an interest in the dovrak keyboard in the 50s and a few businesses and government organizations even considered retraining their typists but in the end it didn't take off later experiments showed that a whole range of designs allowed similar typing speeds to doverak when typists were fully trained suggesting that all of his careful design principles might have had little to no effect after all and then there's the not so small issue of retraining people on a mass scale to use a different keyboard layout it should only take about 52 hours according to dothrak himself but as we've seen he's probably not to be trusted and anyway he wants to book time off work for a typing holiday if you do fancy having a go just for the hell of it though you absolutely can linux windows and mac all offer the option to switch to a dothrak keyboard layout or you could try the more modern version colemag which claims to be far more ergonomical than qwerty since becoming the de facto standard the qwerty keyboard has seen off dozens if not hundreds of competitors in this way it's transferred seamlessly from mechanical typewriters to computers to touch screens and it seems to be ubiquitous wherever the latin alphabet is standard it seems that as a society we're locked into qwerty despite its shortcomings we teach kids to use qwerty because it's everywhere and why is it everywhere because we teach kids to use it but qwerty isn't the only technology to stick around past its cell by date far from it we think of technology as being something progressive that adapts to our existing needs as well as needs we don't know even have yet but sometimes things don't quite work out that way and we find ourselves locked into using a sub-optimal product in fact this phenomenon is so common it has a name path dependence it's when a feature of the economy isn't based on current conditions but rather a sequence of past actions or requirements in a nutshell it's a theory based on the assumption that history matters one classic example of path dependence is the videotape format war a period of intense competition in the late 70s and 80s between betamax and vhs both technologies solved the same problem how to store information efficiently on a cassette tape and many expected sony's betamax to win it offered better image and sound quality than jvc's vhs but sony focused their marketing on time shifting their ads featured headlines like watch whatever whenever highlighting the fact that for the first time ever tv footage didn't have to be watched when it went on air jvc on the other hand cunningly focused their efforts on getting cosy with the new video rental industry when that market grew vhs dominated its titles the stores gave more shelf space to the slightly more dominant brand which then dominated even more this created a bandwagon effect manufacturers switched to vhs because they expected it to win the battle locking consumers in even further finally sony in a surprising act of moral superiority refused to let pornography companies license their technology for mass production which meant that nearly all porn released on video used vhs format and that as you might expect was the final nail in the coffin for betamax vhs won the video format war despite being an inferior product and betamax wasn't seen again until a guest appearance in the mighty boosh of course both betamax and vhs went on to be replaced by dvd then blu-ray and finally digital streaming and it isn't difficult to imagine that's a similar fate awaits qwerty it seems that no other keyboard layout will be able to replace it but will keyboards themselves become a thing of the past in the not too distant future tap for instance is a one-handed gadget that fits over your fingers kind of like rubbery brass knuckles and connects wirelessly to your smartphone you then tap your fingers in certain combinations to create letters and you could theoretically do this anywhere on a table your arm somebody else's arm it's supposed to free you from keyboards entirely by acting as a go anywhere typing interface other text such as predictive typing software is also starting to make the keyboard less essential google's smart compose for instance offers simple and sometimes hilarious ai powered suggestions and responses it's already saved people from typing over a billion characters each week enough to fill the pages of 1 000 copies of lord of the rings there's even a possibility we won't need any kind of input interface at all norable is a massachusetts-based startup that's working on a way to type simply by thinking their method isn't exactly subtle as it uses an electro-dotted headband to track your brain activity but machine learning helps it figure out which letter you're trying to select and anticipate the one you'll want next imagine the fun that drunk you is going to have with that one so if qwerty is ever replaced it's looking like the winner will be a completely different type of input altogether not just another keyboard layout but there's another way qwerty has affected society that's perhaps a little bit more disturbing than inefficient typing and carpal tunnel syndrome in 2012 two psychology researchers kyle jasmine and danielle casasanto demonstrated something they called the qwerty effect they figured out that words using a higher proportion of letters from the right hand side of the keyboard tend to be easier to type that's because the qwerty keyboard is asymmetrical meaning there are more letters on the left of the midline than on the right weirdly enough they discovered we associate these easier to reach words with more positive emotions and that because of this qwerty may have influenced the emergence of new words such as lol and even our choice of baby names from around 1990 which the team defined as the dawn of the modern keyboard era invented names had a much higher proportion of right side letters than popular names of the previous three decades and existing names with more right side keys names like noah sophia and liam were also increasingly favored the researchers even went on to advise that people responsible for naming new products brands and companies might do well to consult their keyboard when choosing the right name pun intended this turned out to be sound advice four years later another study carried out by david garcia and marcus streimer found that people do indeed prefer products and video titles spelled with more right hand side letters the pair gathered huge amounts of data from websites like amazon imdb yelp youtube and even pornhub and found that content with more right side letters was on average more highly rated by the audience in terms of reviews likes and ratings in other words qwerty is actively shaping our choices as we filter language through our fingers so next time you're kicking back to enjoy the latest 42 video doing some late night shopping or engaging in some self-love send a virtual high-five to christopher scholes after all he's probably playing a more active role in all our lives than many of us would have ever imagined thanks for watching thanks again to manscape.com for sponsoring this video don't forget to check it out using the link in the description below

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 471,250

Rating: 4.9275436 out of 5

Keywords: Keyboard, qwerty, design, computer, documentary, history, interesting

Id: atYNpi3q29M

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 24 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/para_lyzed]

The QWERTY layout was not designed to slow people down, it was designed to minimize the risk of consecutive keys being pressed in quick succession to reduce mechanical failure in typewriters. If you want proof of this, just look at the fastest typists in the world. If QWERTY slowed people down, you would expect to see alternative typing layouts dominating the leaderboards, but the fact of the matter is that it's just a layout, and doesn't inherently slow anyone down. There are a few typists in the top 20 that are able to use multiple layouts, but most of them are fastest at QWERTY. There are also people in the top 20 that use alternative layouts exclusively.

[u/SuperMeteorite]

Workman gang rise up!