Dvorak Keyboards made typists faster by reducing finger movement
The QWERTY layout solved the lever jam bottleneck. A better approach to solve that bottleneck is to have no levers altogether.
Resolve one bottleneck and a new bottleneck emerges. Now the problem is to reduce human finger movement. This is the basic idea of the Dvorak keyboard:
Dvorak keyboards were intended to try and be easy on AVERAGE human hands rather than trying to save expensive machines. Improvements in technology meant the bottleneck moved.
Basically it’s hard to know if Dvorak keyboards are faster for most people because to learn to touch type on a QWERTY keyboard is so much effort that most people don’t have the time. Then you have the problem of being in a world full of QWERTY keyboards that you still have to deal with.
But this was just the start.