DV Info

1819 - Christopher Latham Sholes, inventor of the first commercially viable typewriter, is born near Mooresburg, PA.

1873 - Sholes invents the first practical typewriter, with the QWERTY keyboard layout.

1878 - Remington No. 2 typewriting machine introduced (fixed typebar design problems).

1888 -  Touch typing with all ten fingers introduced by Frank E. McGurrin.

1889 - Sholes applies for a patent for an improved keyboard layout design (it was approved seven years later).

1890 - Sholes dies at the age of 71.

1894 - August Dvorak born.

1932 - After years of research, Dr. August Dvorak invents the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout at the University of Washington.

1936 - Dr. Dvorak publishes his findings on the ergonomics and mathematics of typing in Typewriting Behavior: Psychology Applied to Teaching and Learning Typewriting. The book is currently out of print, but can still be found in many university libraries.

1975 - August Dvorak dies, a bitter man: "I'm tired of trying to do something worthwhile for the human race," he complained. "They simply don't want to change!"

1982 - ANSI approves the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard Layout as an official keyboard layout.

1997 - Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Guns, Germs and Steel", publishes The Curse of QWERTY in Discover magazine, explaining the history of QWERTY and Dvorak to a broad non-scientific audience.

2005 - Alec, Frunch and GCB self-publish The Dvorak Zine!

2011 - Alec, Frunch and GCB change the license of The Dvorak Zine to a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, allowing others to improve and translate it, so its message can continue to spread.