May 12th, 1936 – The Dvorak keyboard was patented by University of Washington education professor August Dvorak. He worked with his brother-in-law John Dealey, an education professor at North Texas State Teachers College, to develop a keyboard that would increase typing speed while simultaneously decreasing typos. They both recognized the flaws that the QWERTY keyboard had, such as increased typos due to over half of all keystrokes taking place on the top row making it so that typists had to move their fingers off the home keys, and worked to create one that would remedy the problems. And after some trial and error, the Dvorak keyboard was born.
The pair actually released the first version of the keyboard in 1932, however, it did not become patented until 1936. The keyboard began to gain a lot of support and recognition after some campaigning by Dvorak. He trained typists on how to use it and entered them in typing competitions where they often won – beating those who used the QWERTY layout. Some schools even began to use the Dvorak keyboard and found that their students were able to learn typewriting much quicker as a result. In the end though, QWERTY reigned victorious and remains the keyboard of choice for most individuals.
