News of the death of the QWERTY keyboard came, as well it would, via TikTok.
It is there that Riley Keen posts videos of himself tapping out 500 words per minute – double the amount the human mind can compute. Using a CharaChorder – a device that looks almost like a digi-age dumbbell, with nine small joysticks on each of two black spheres connected by a silver bar – Keen is able to touch-type so fast that he has recently been banned from online typing competitions. Leaderboards automatically flag his scores as cheating, they transgress so far beyond even the most advanced human skill.
CharaChorder, of which Keen is CEO, is "creating a new standard for the digital age" – one that will allow users to "type at the speed of thought". The device can type individual letters, but the real gains are made by "chording", where the user inputs several at a time, generating a predicted word. This method is similar to that used by stenographers: they take down words by syllable (so "calendar" can be reached in three strokes – cal/en/dar), rather than eight individual taps. While the stenographer's keyboard doesn't boast CharaChorder's 17 billion-word combinations, its 22 keys mean 300 words can be formed each minute.
Not necessary, you might think, to sate most of our needs to bash out a few emails. But speed-typing has been a prized skill since at least the early 1900s, when Rose L. Fitz – a 17-year-old American fresh out of stenography school – was named the world's fastest; in 1908, the then-Prince of Wales (later George V) watched her reach 113wpm without error, on a sheet he asked her to autograph. Speed-typing's cachet kept climbing; halls filled with competitive typists spread across North America by the 1930s, with hopefuls often adorning their desks with the trophies they had accrued.
The advent of computers in the 1970s didn't dent that, but rather sped it up. The layout of the QWERTY keyboard (so named for the first six characters on the top row) was lifted from the first commercially successful typewriter, which had reached the market a century earlier – and still, little has changed. Dvorak attempted to unseat it in the mid-1930s, with an ergonomic design that spread the typing evenly across each hand (QWERTY is almost 60 per cent left-reliant); its middle row can create 3000 common English words, compared to the sub-100 of its predecessor. It was championed by Barbara Blackburn, who in 1985 broke and then maintained the Guinness World Record as the world's fastest typist, reaching 150wpm over 50 minutes. She was later invited on to The David Letterman Show to exhibit her skills to an audience of 17 million.
