Friday, January 14, 2011

Demonstrations of typing speed were a source of public entertainment. In 1888 a well-publicized contest was held in Cincinnati that pitted Louis Taub, who had been traveling in the east and billing himself as the world's fastest typist, against Francis McGurrin, a typist from Salt Lake City. Taub used a rival machine with a rival keyboard arrangement, the Calligraph, and a hunt-and-peck method of typing. -- Stan Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis: "Policy and Path Dependence", Regulation, Vol.18, No.3 (Summer 1995), pp.33-41.

Well, Prof. Liebowitz and Prof. Margolis, you seem to have mistaken both competitor's names, Mr. Louis Traub and Mr. Frank Edward McGurrin, at the typewriter competition on July 25, 1888. Mr. Traub had visited the 1887 Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis, where he exhibited his typing skill on Caligraph No.2 with a blank keyboard (cf. History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio; S. B. Nelson, Cincinnati (1894)). Mr. Traub was an eight-finger typist on Caligraph No.2 (not Calligraph) as I mentioned before.

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