August Dvorak was an educational psychologist and professor of education at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. Dvorak became interested in the keyboard layout while serving as an advisor to Gertrude Ford, who was writing her master's thesis on typing errors. Touch typing had come into wide use by that time, so when Dvorak studied the QWERTY layout he concluded that the QWERTY layout needed to be replaced. Dvorak was joined by his brother-in-law William Dealey, who was a professor of education at the then North Texas State Teacher's College in Denton, Texas. Dvorak and Dealey's objective was scientifically to design a keyboard to decrease typing errors, speed up typing, and lessen typer fatigue. They engaged in extensive research while designing their keyboard layout. In 1914 and 1915, Dealey attended seminars on the science of motion and later reviewed slow-motion films of typists with Dvorak. Dvorak and Dealey meticulously studied the English language, researching the most used letters and letter combinations. They also studied the physiology of the hand. The result in 1932 was the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. In 1933, Dvorak started entering typists trained on his keyboard into the International Commercial Schools Contest, which were typing contests sponsored by typewriter manufacturers consisting of professional and amateur contests. The professional contests had typists sponsored by typewriter companies to advertise their machines. In addition, QWERTY typists did not want to be placed near Dvorak typists because QWERTY typists were disconcerted by the noise produced from the fast typing speeds made by Dvorak typists. In the 1930s, the Tacoma, Washington school district ran an experimental program in typing designed by Dvorak to determine whether to hold Dvorak layout classes. The experiment used 2,700 students to learn the Dvorak layout, and the district found that the Dvorak layout students learned the keyboard in one-third the time it took to learn QWERTY. When a new school board was elected, however, it chose to close the Dvorak layout classes. During World War II, while in the Navy Dvorak conducted experiments which he claimed showed that typists could be retrained to Dvorak in a mere 10 days, though he discarded at least two previous studies which were conducted and whose results are unknown. With such great apparent gains, interest in the Dvorak keyboard layout increased by the early 1950s. Numerous businesses and government organizations began to consider retraining their typists on Dvorak keyboards. In this environment, the General Services Administration commissioned Earle Strong to determine whether the switch from QWERTY to Dvorak should be made. After retraining a selection of typists from QWERTY to Dvorak, once the Dvorak group had regained their previous typing speed (which took 100 hours of training, more than was claimed in the Navy test conducted by Dvorak), Strong took a second group of QWERTY typists chosen for equal ability to the Dvorak group and retrained them in QWERTY in order to improve their speed at the same time the Dvorak typists were training. The carefully controlled study failed to show any benefit to the Dvorak keyboard layout in typing or training speed. Strong recommended retraining QWERTY typists in order to increase their speed over switching, and attributed the previous apparent benefits of Dvorak to improper experimental design and outright bias on the part of Dvorak, who had designed and run the previous studies. However, Strong had a personal grudge against Dvorak and had made public statements before that study was even performed voicing his opposition to any alternative keyboard layout. Despite this, interest in the Dvorak keyboard layout subsequently waned. Later experiments have shown that many keyboard layouts, including some alphabetical ones, allow very similar typing speeds to QWERTY and Dvorak when typists have been trained in them, suggesting that the basic design principles underlying Dvorak may have failed to produce results because typing is a very complicated physical activity. The work of Dvorak paved the way for other optimized keyboard layouts for English, such as Colemak but also other languages like German with Neo and French with BÉPO.