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These studies demonstrate the inferiority of alphabetically organized keyboards as compared with a randomly organized keyboard and the standard Sholes (qwerty) keyboard. Use of the alphabetic keyboard requires considerable mental processing; the novice is faced with a trade-off between mental processing and visual search, and this makes different keyboard layouts equivalent. Comparison of different keyboard layouts by computer simulation of expert typing shows surprisingly little effect of keyboard arrangement for a wide class of keyboards. Performance with some alphabetical layouts is quite slow, but with others, it is within 2% of the speed achieved when using the Sholes keyboard. Performance with the Dvorak keyboard is only improved by about 5% over performance on the Sholes keyboard. The conclusion is that it is not worthwhile to use alphabetic keyboards for novice typists, nor to change to the Dvorak layout for experts. Keyboards can probably be improved, but only through radical redesign of the present physical key configuration.

Objective: The author reviews the paper by Kroemer (1972) on the design of the split geometry keyboard and the subsequent 35 years of research on the topic. Background: It was first suggested in the 1920s that arm strain in the typist could be reduced by splitting the keyboard into two halves and inclining the two halves laterally. The first systematic research on the split keyboard was conducted by Kroemer in the 1960s and published in his 1972 article. Methods: The literature on split geometry keyboards was identified, and the progression of the research was reviewed. Results: The Kroemer article marked the beginning of a prolonged, worldwide research effort to determine whether and how the split keyboard design might improve comfort and prevent pain in keyboard users. Conclusions: In the early 1990s, split keyboard designs began to be broadly commercially available. Clear evidence of a health benefit of the split keyboards emerged in the late 1990s. By 2006, a split keyboard was the number one—selling keyboard, of all keyboards sold, in the U.S. retail market. Application: The history of research on this topic, the challenges to changing the conventional design, and the broader acceptance of the split design are a success story with lessons for all of us.

Music – as many of the contributors to this special issue of Urban History point out – is an important component of the urban experience and can play a significant role in the construction of a civic identity, and yet it is a topic that urban historians have tended to overlook. There are some parallels with the case of the fine arts, to which a special issue of this journal was devoted in 1995, both in the causes for this neglect – which similarly include 'the intimidating traditions of connoisseurship associated with the field' and the difficulty we have with analysing the 'aesthetic experience' – and in the developments which are helping to overcome such inhibitions. So far, the impulse seems to be coming from musicologists and music historians, who, inhabiting a fairly small corner of the academic field, are fully conscious of the need to forge connections with other disciplines and historiographical traditions. The importance of contextualizing and historicizing not only the composition but also the production, transmission and reception of music has been recognized for some time, but so far urban historians have not responded as perhaps the music historians thought they might to the insights and openings that a musical 'new historicism' seems to offer. But there is clearly an opportunity – indeed, a pressing need – to develop a broadly-based cultural history of towns and cities in which music will take its place. The aim of this special issue is to promote that objective by illustrating the state of the art and suggesting some of the ideas, tools and methodologies with which it might be developed in future.