It isn't easy to type Quirty on a Quirty keyboard. My left hand little finger holds the

shift key, then the other fingers crab sideways across the upper row QWERTY. 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 Quirty 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 stakes here are 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 ink

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 5 or 6 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 Quirty supposedly did.

And again, if Quirty 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.

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