Can't resist jumping into this thread.

My father, Albert Tangora (1903-1978),
was the fastest typist, or one of the two fastest,
of the era before electric typewriters (1941).
He won the professional contest seven times.
Guinness Book always said his record was
147 wpm, but that was early on, before they realized
that different texts had different average word lengths,
and so they standardized word length by taking total strokes
and dividing by five.  His record was 142 net 5-stroke words
per minute for an hour, and it still stands,
for a "manual" machine.  The professional contest
required typing for an hour from unfamiliar copy.
You fed your own paper (he lost 3/5 of a second
between sheets of paper).  "Net" reflects the penalty
of 10 words off your hour total for each error;
if the lower-case letter after a capital was misaligned
that counted as an error.  142 wpm is about 12 strokes
per second -- for an hour.  When he was in his 60s
he told me he still had dreams (or nightmares)
that he was training for the contest.

As a stunt he would type on memorized copy
that was cunningly laid out to be convenient
for the fingers, and he could get up to around 250 wpm.

The machines were not stock machines; the type bars were
filed down to make them lighter, and most of the tab stops
were taken off the carriage for the same reason.

For years he worked for Underwood and then Royal,
traveling around the country giving demonstrations
to typing classes in high schools and business schools.
When I went to college (in California) the parents of
the girls I dated usually remembered having seen him.

There's more but this is long enough already.

You should see our home movies.

On 4/27/2010 8:10 AM, Jim Hicks wrote:
> I remember something in the past with someone connected with Broadway (a
> man) being able to type 120 wpm. Big mucky muck producer I think.
> j
>
>> From: David West<[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Re: [BP] rivets -- i want to learn about rivets
>>
>> Mary
>>
>> As a teenage boy, I had almost the polar opposite of your experience.
>>
>> At the beginning of my third year of five years at high school, my
>> mother and I agreed that I should take Typing as my third elective
>> subject, on the grounds that I was intending to go to University, and
>> being able to type my essays and papers would be a significant advantage
>> (we hadn't made the connection between the Apple IIe computer that I was
>> spending my spare time at school writing incredibly Basic programs for
>> and its subsequent evolution into the desktop PCs on which I have for
>> many years written all of my reports and correspondence on a daily
>> basis).
>>
>> The school refused to accept my choice on the grounds that I was an
>> 'academic' student, and should be taking three academic subjects as
>> electives.  My mother had to demand an audience with the Principal in
>> order to get me admitted to the Typing class - during which she pointed
>> out that we already knew that I would be studying Maths I&  II, Physics,
>> Chemistry and one other subject, probably English (in the end, it was
>> Art) in my final year, so that it really didn't matter which elective
>> subjects I did in my third year ...
>>
>> Anyway, I took Typing that year (1979, I recall).  Within the first
>> couple of months of the class, when we were typing drills (on the manual
>> typewriters) to recordings of music with a strong metronome, I was
>> annoying my classmates by typing in first double time, then triple and
>> occasionally quadruple time.  By the end of the year, I had an
>> accredited typing speed of 55 wpm (words per minute), and had passed at
>> least one test at 65 wpm.  The target for students in the class was 30
>> wpm.
>>
>> I put it down to having learnt the piano from the age of 6, and thus
>> being used to moving my fingers independently without watching where
>> they needed to land.
>>
>> For most of my first decade at work, I used to reassure myself that if,
>> for any reason, I was one day out of work, I could go and get temporary
>> work as a typist!!  Never did though.
>>
>> Over thirty years on, I know it was one of the most useful classes I
>> have ever taken.  I am able to type significantly faster than I can
>> write by hand, and it is correct and legible and electronically
>> transmissible.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> David West
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Mary
>> Sent: Tuesday, 27 April 2010 2:34 PM
>>
>> Because folks have shared childhood learning experiences, here's one of
>> mine (although I did have similar epiphanies and clandestine
>> wanderings and borrowings -- none of which involved kitchen stuff--
>> which might explain how enlightening this particular experience was.
>>
>> So, in the beginning high school, I was drooling at the prospect of
>> electives after eight years of Catholic school. I signed up for shop.
>> The high school counsellor/advisor changed it to typing. And I thought
>> she was my friend. Girls don't take shop and girls need to know how to
>> type.
>>
>> .....
>>
>> Signed unrepentant,
>>
>> Mary V

-- 

Martin C. Tangora
tangora (at) uic.edu

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