QWERTY

Episode Summary

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The QWERTY keyboard layout has become the standard keyboard layout worldwide, even though it may not be the most efficient layout. QWERTY was originally designed in the 1860s by Christopher Latham Scholes for typewriters. It was adopted by Remington and became popular with typists being trained on this layout. Although alternative layouts like Dvorak were proposed as being more ergonomic and efficient, QWERTY maintained dominance due to network effects. Employers bought QWERTY typewriters because that is what typists were trained on, and typists learned QWERTY because that is what employers used. This illustrates the concept of lock-in, where an inferior standard can get locked in and be difficult to displace. The QWERTY example was popularized by economist Paul David as demonstrating the inefficiency of lock-in. However, some economists like Leibowitz and Margolis argue that QWERTY may not be clearly inferior. Although Dvorak is better for expert typists, for regular users the advantage is minor and does not justify the switching costs. Most people today continue to use QWERTY even when alternatives are easily available. Lock-in remains relevant today for technology standards set by dominant companies like Microsoft, Facebook and Apple. It is an open debate whether these constitute true lock-in that regulators should address, or whether consumers could switch if better alternatives emerged. The continued prevalence of QWERTY suggests lock-in may sometimes persist even without significant switching costs.

Episode Show Notes

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The QWERTY keyboard layout has stood the test of time, from the clattering of early typewriters to the virtual keyboard on the screen of any smart-phone. Myths abound as to why keys are laid out this way – and whether there are much better alternatives languishing in obscurity. Tim Harford explains how this is a debate about far more than touch-typing: whether the QWERTY keyboard prospers because it works, or as an immovable relic of a commercial scramble in the late 19th century, is a question that affects how we should deal with the huge digital companies that now dominate our online experiences.

Producer: Ben Crighton Editor: Richard Vadon

(Image: qwerty keyboard, Credit: Getty Images)

Episode Transcript

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SPEAKER_02: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising. SPEAKER_01: Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right, we're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. New activation and upfront payment SPEAKER_03: for three month plan required. Taxes and fees extra. Additional restrictions apply. See Mintmobile.com for full terms. SPEAKER_04: 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford. SPEAKER_00: It isn't easy to type QWERTY on a QWERTY keyboard. My left hand little finger holds the shift key, then the other fingers crab sideways across the upper row. Q W E R T Y. That particular combination is awkward. There's a lesson here. It matters where the keys sit on your keyboard. There are good arrangements and bad ones. Many people think that QWERTY is a bad one. In fact, that it was deliberately designed to be slow and awkward. Could that be true? And why do economists of all people argue about this? It turns out that the state makes here a higher than they might first appear. But let's start by figuring out why anyone might have been perverse enough to want to slow down typists. In the early 1980s, I persuaded my mother to take down her mechanical typewriter from a high shelf, delighted by this miraculous machine. I'd bang down on a key. Not easy for little fingers. And when I did, a lever would flick up from behind the keyboard, a tiny golf club of a thing that would whack hard against an inked ribbon, squeezing that ink against a sheet of paper. On the end of the lever, called a type bar, would be a pair of reversed letters in relief. I discovered through impish trial and error that if I hit several keys at once, the type bars all flew up at the same time into the same spot, like two or three golfers all trying to strike the same ball. For a professional typist, the results would leave something to be desired. And a professional typist might just run into that problem. Typing at 60 words a minute, no stretch for a good typist, means five or six letters striking the same spot each second. And at such a speed, the typist might need to be slowed down for the sake of the typewriter. And that is what QWERTY supposedly did. Then again, if QWERTY really was designed to be slow, how come the most popular pair of letters in English, T-H, are adjacent and right under the index fingers? The plot thickens. The father of the QWERTY keyboard, Christopher Latham Scholes, a printer from Wisconsin, sold his first typewriter in 1868 to Edward Payson Porter of Porter's Telegraph College, Chicago, which gives a clue as to what was going on. The QWERTY layout was designed for the convenience of telegraph operators transcribing Morse code. Why do we still use it? The simple answer is that QWERTY won a battle for dominance in the 1880s. Scholes' design was taken up by the gunsmiths, E. Remington & Sons. It wasn't the only typewriter around. Scholes has been described as the 52nd man to invent the typewriter. But the QWERTY keyboard emerged victorious. Yet this brief struggle for market dominance in 1880s America determines the layout of the keyboard on an iPad. Nobody then was thinking about our interests today, but their actions control ours. These things have a momentum of their own. And that's a shame because more logical layouts exist, notably the Dvorak, designed by August Dvorak and patented in 1932. It favours the stronger hand. Left and right hand layouts are available and it puts the most used keys together. The US Navy conducted a study in the 1940s demonstrating that the Dvorak was vastly superior. Training typists to use the Dvorak layout would pay for itself many times over. So why didn't we all switch to Dvorak? The problem lay in coordinating the switch. QWERTY had been the universal layout since before August Dvorak was born. Most typists trained on it. Any employer investing in a costly typewriter would naturally choose the layout that most typists could use. Economies of scale kicked in. QWERTY type prices became cheaper to produce and thus cheaper to buy. Everyone trained on QWERTY. Every office used it. Dvorak keyboards never stood a chance. So now we start to see why this case matters. For a leading economic historian Paul David, QWERTY is the quintessential example of something economists call lock-in. Paul David argued that we get locked into standards like QWERTY all the time. This isn't about typewriters. It's about Microsoft Office and Windows. Amazon's control of the retail link between online buyers and sellers. And Facebook's dominance of social media. If all your friends are on Facebook apps such as Instagram and WhatsApp, doesn't that lock you in just as surely as a QWERTY typist? It doesn't matter if you personally might want to make the shift. You can't do it by yourself. The stakes here are high. Lock-in is the friend of monopolists, the enemy of competition, and may require a robust response from regulators. But there are two sides to the argument. Maybe these dominant standards are dominant not because of lock-in, but just because the alternatives simply aren't as compelling as we imagine. Consider that famous navy study that demonstrated the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard. Two economists, Stan Leibowitz and Stephen Margolis, unearthed that study and concluded it was badly flawed. They also raised an eyebrow at the name of the man who supervised it. The navy's leading time and motion expert, one Lieutenant Commander, August Dvorak. Leibowitz and Margolis don't deny that the Dvorak design may be better. After all, the world's fastest alphanumeric typists do use Dvorak keyboards. They're just not convinced that this was ever an example where an entire society was desperate to switch to a hugely superior standard, yet unable to coordinate. These days, most of us peck away at our own emails on devices which make it easy to switch your keyboard layout. Windows, iOS, and Android all offer Dvorak layouts. If you prefer it, you no longer need to persuade your co-workers, your employers, and secretarial schools to switch with you. You can just use it. Nobody else is even going to notice. Yet most of us stick with QWERTY. The door is no longer locked, but we can't be bothered to escape. Lock-in seems to be entrenching the position of some of the most powerful and valuable companies in the world today, including Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. Maybe those locks are as unbreakable as the QWERTY standard once seemed. Or maybe they're vulnerable to being crowbarred off at the first sign of restless consumers. It wasn't long ago, after all, that people worried about users being locked in to MySpace. One of the most important questions in the economy today is whether the locks that surround technology standards are formidable or feeble.