Your typing speed on the computer probably isn't very high. The curious thing is that almost nobody types at the maximum possible speed, because keyboard layouts are carefully designed to make it that way. But for over 80 years, a solution has existed: the Dvorak keyboard.
Incredible as it may seem, the arrangement of keys on your keyboard (and everyone else's) is made so that typing, at least in English, is as difficult as possible. And in reality, there was a very good reason for it.
The QWERTY keyboards, so called because of the first six letters on the top alphabetical row, have had that distribution since the days of the first mechanical typewriters. This design was patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to the famous Remington company in 1973, and it was meant to solve a mechanical problem derived from the internal system of these machines.
If you look closely at what happens when you press a key on a mechanical typewriter, you'll see a metal rod with the character stamped on its upper end rise at high speed from the inside of the machine to strike the inked ribbon and paper. This action is what draws the character on the paper. Then the rod returns to its original position.
If you try to press two keys at once, it's very likely that the rods will reach the cylinder at the same time and become tangled together. This is exactly what happened to the fastest typists, and that's why Sholes set out to complicate the keyboard as much as possible so that office workers would be as slow as possible when writing.
Today, with billions of keyboards installed on computers all over the world, the QWERTY layout is certainly the most used, even though there is no practical reason to keep typing slowly, because, as you may have noticed, your keyboard has no rods that jam no matter how many keys you press at once.
The Dvorak Keyboard
Many people have created more efficient keyboard designs. The most well-known is the one proposed by doctors August Dvorak and William Dealey in the 1920s and 30s. Known simply as the "Dvorak keyboard", it was designed taking into account the frequency with which each letter appears in English and the physiology of the hand. These are the same parameters Sholes took into account, but with the opposite goal.
The Dvorak keyboard is easier to use, since most words are written using fingers from both hands. It is known that to achieve maximum typing speed, the most common letters should be on the middle row (where your fingers rest) and the rarer ones on the bottom row, which is the hardest to reach. Dvorak took this into account when distributing the letters. Moreover, even at the cost of upsetting a few people, he put the most frequently used letters on the right side, because most people are right-handed.
And he didn't stop there. He also thought it was easier to write words if they started on the outside of the keyboard and were typed toward the center, because physiologically the hand is more efficient operating that way. You can try it by tapping on the table from your pinky to your index finger and vice versa, to see that Dvorak was right.
Dvorak finished his design in 1932 and obtained the corresponding patent in 1936. In 1982 it was recognized as an alternative to the QWERTY layout by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). However, despite all this, it is estimated that only about 100,000 users worldwide use this keyboard.
The reasons for its low acceptance are easy to see: it is very difficult for a typist to retrain to use a keyboard with the keys in a different position. During World War II, the U.S. Army tested 15 people trained on a Dvorak keyboard and compared them with the results of people using conventional keyboards, and determined that the former were up to 40% faster than the latter. However, this study is often questioned because it was conducted under the supervision of the then owner of the patent.
Today you can get keyboards with this layout for your computer. Or if you want to try it without spending a single coin, you can use this "QWERTY to Dvorak converter" to see how fast you are using it. If it works for you, maybe when you buy your next computer you'll ask for a Dvorak keyboard.
