Wow!!!

I'd always wondered what was the limit on a manual machine ... and now
I'm only two degrees of separation from the fastest typists of all time!

As for typing for an hour from unrecognised copy ... my fingers ache
already.

David West
Executive Director
internationalconservationservices
T:     +61 (2) 9417 3311
M:    +61 (411) 692 696
sustaining your heritage
-----Original Message-----
From: The listserv where the buildings do the talking
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martin C.
Tangora
Sent: Wednesday, 28 April 2010 1:32 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [BP] rivets -- i want to learn about rivets

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.

--
**Please remember to trim posts, as requested in the Terms of Service**

To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://listserv.icors.org/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>