By then, events which would transform the entire history of
the typewriter were well and truly underway. Before the end of 1878, McGurrin
had firmly established, at least for his own benefit, the tenets of touch
typing. “ … boy like, I made up my mind that whatever a girl could do I could,
so I set to work to learn to operate without looking at the keyboard. I
discarded my former method of two or three fingers and determined to use all my
fingers. Before the end of the year 1878 I could write upwards of 90 words a
minute in new matter” (that is, previously unseen copy).
In his own little typewriting world, things had moved very
quickly for Frank McGurrin with his special skills. Yet astonishingly, given
the impact the advent of touch typing would have on the typewriter industry,
there was to be a full decade between McGurrin’s mastery of the technique and
the wider world finding out about it. In the interim, there was scant
recognition of McGurrin’s typing achievements. On September 1, 1881, Ithaca
stenographer Theodore Cuyler Rose (1843-1921) gave a talk on “The Future of the
Profession” at Palmer House, Chicago, during the convention of the International
Association of Shorthand Writers of the United States and Canada. In his
speech, Rose said, “Within the past week I saw a young man in an office in
Grand Rapids write on a test 97 words on the typewriter and read the copy. He
did not look at the machine at all but kept his eyes on the copy.”
Rose’s words about McGurrin, however, remained pretty much confined
to those who heard him utter them that day in Chicago. They were not reported in
newspapers at the time, but eventually found their way into various magazines
and books recording proceedings and transactions of national and state stenography,
shorthand and phonography associations. Even then, it would be almost 6½ more years
before someone decided to take up their implicit challenge.
In
the meantime, McGurrin got on with his life. On July 8, 1885, he was appointed
by Michigan Governor Russell A. Alger as official stenographer of the Ninth
Judicial Circuit in Kalamazoo (a position in which he was later succeeded by
his brother Charles H. McGurrin [1866-1915], who also succeeded Frank as world
speed typing record holder). On June 30, 1886, Frank McGurrin married Jennie A.
Darling in Paw Paw, Michigan, with Charles as a witness. On September 15, Frank
was appointed official stenographer for the Third Federal Court District in
Salt Lake City, after a contest against other contenders in which he’d shown
“marked ability”. He was to hold the post for eight years.
As
for his search for typing speed, McGurrin acquired a Remington No 2. Compared
to the Sholes & Glidden and Remington No 1, the No 2 was a vast improvement.
It was far sturdier, much better designed and more competently made. Plus it
had carriage shift. In an article published in The Phonographic World in February 1889, McGurrin persuasively
argued that the carriage shift gave Remington typists a distinct advantage when
speed typing against double-keyboard operators. “In typewriting,” he said, “the
speed is limited by the action of the mind, and not of the fingers.” McGurrin’s
typing system, in which he did not use his left thumb, was to hit the spacebar
with his right thumb - he employed the shift key fleetingly with his left
little finger – was ideally suited to the Remington No 2. There was no wrist
movement. McGurrin wrote, “The method commonly in use, of depressing the
shift-key first, and then striking the capital desired, is erroneous. The
proper way is to make the depression of the shift-key and the stroke of the
letter exactly simultaneous. A perfect capital letter will be obtained in
this way without loss of time.”
On
June 7, 1887, McGurrin left Salt Lake City on three months’ leave, travelling
east in the hope of finding speed typing competition. The Salt Lake City Daily Tribune boldly forecast he would
“make the typewriting fraternity there [in New York City] feel like looking around
for a final resting place by his unparalleled speed on the machine.”
THE WORLD TITLE TYPE-OFF
Frank McGurrin publically
laid claim to being the “first typewriter in the country” (first that is, in
terms of speed) in an article announcing his Salt Lake City appointment, which
appeared in the Salt Lake Daily Tribune
on September 10, 1886. The article went on to report that McGurrin was “willing
to put up $500 [$13,500 in today’s money] that no one can beat him”. At the
time McGurrin’s top speed was put at 100 words per minute. There were no
takers, so McGurrin repeated the challenge in The Typewriter Operator in January, February and May 1888. The last
was picked up and reprinted in The
Cosmopolitan Shorthander in Toronto, Canada, and finally McGurrin found
someone willing to take him on.
Louis
A. Traub (1859-1916), a German-born typing and shorthand instructor in
Cincinnati, Ohio, had arrived in the United States in 1882 without a word of
English. Yet he quickly established himself as not just a typist and
stenographer in his newly adopted language, but as a willing and competitive
sportsman, always up for a challenge. In September 1883 he won a pedestrian (race
walking) match by walking laps to amass 46 miles. Traub also bowled $500 stakes and
attended the fight nights at Eureka Hall in the West End.
Initially
he worked for A.J. Graham’s Phonographic Academy, but was to take over Longley's Short-Hand and Type-Writing Institute as
manager after Margaret Longley joined her ailing husband Elias in Pasadena in
1885. Traub conditionally accepted
McGurrin’s challenge on May 27, 1888. One of three revised
terms for the typing contest that Traub insisted upon in his reply to The Cosmopolitan Shorthander was that
Wyckoff, Seaman & Benedict, makers and sellers of the Remington, must not
be involved, nor any other typewriter manufacturers. Traub and McGurrin staked
$250 a side.
In
a very strange connection, Traub once saved a woman from drowning herself after
a domestic dispute, many years before McGurrin was involved in a very similar
and in his case far more tragic event. Typing and shorthand aside, the only thing the
pair really had in common was that they were both members of the Knights of
Columbus.
Graham’s,
like most such operations, had a deal with one of the then three extant
typewriter manufacturers – in the case of Graham, it was through general agent
C.G. Muller with Caligraph, a double keyboard machine with space bars on either
side of the keyboard and a long central spring instead of a rear mainspring and
drawband. Whatever led Traub to believe this machine could match the Remington
No 2’s comparatively compact single keyboard with carriage shift will never be
known. With the benefit of hindsight it would seem an impossible task. But
Traub had a commercial commitment to the Caligraph company. Admittedly, no one
could be certain until Traub faced McGurrin exactly how the Caligraph would
fare.
Now called the Cincinnatian Hotel, it was the Bradford Block and the Palace Hotel, on the corner of Sixth and Vine, Cincinnati, when McGurrin and Taub faced off in 1888.
In the event - on Wednesday, July 25, 1888 - the Caligraph
fared very, very badly. The showdown started at 10.10am and ended at 12.20pm at the Longley Shorthand and Typewriting Institute at rooms
20-21 Bradford Block in Cincinnati. (The venue was close to what is today the Cincinnatian
Hotel.) There was much praise for Traub’s performance in trying to stay the
pace with McGurrin, but all could see it was a hopeless cause, and it was the
machine rather than the man that McGurrin beat so convincingly. The Cincinnati Equirer reported, “It was evident that
Mr Traub could operate faster than his machine would respond.”
The Enquirer had previewed
the contest, the first of its kind anywhere in the world, under the banner
headlines: “Racing Typewriters. Championship of the World. Crack Operators on
Rival Machines”. The event lasted 105 minutes, with a 15-minute rest between 45
minutes of typing from dictation and 45 minutes of typing from copy, all matter
being ordinary court proceedings, new to both typists. The second half was a
distinct advantage for McGurrin, who didn’t need to look at his keyboard. The
judges and timekeepers were leading Cincinnati stenographers and typists Norman
F. Dean, Edwin N. Williams and Buchanan Perin. McGurrin won the toss and chose
dictation first, with Traub, in another room, typing from copy first. The
scores: McGurrin 4294 from dictation (95.55wpm), 4415 from copy (98.11wpm),
total 8709 (96.77wpm); Traub 3747 from dictation (83.26wpm), 3191 from copy
(70.91wpm), total 6938 (77.01wpm). The margin in favour of McGurrin was 1771
words, or 25.38 per cent. Traub’s inability to type copy “blind” cost him
dearly (a 1224-word difference); as well, McGurrin had made few mistakes, while
Traub had made plenty. McGurrin had typed at an average of 7½ stokes a second.
The next morning McGurrin gave another exhibition of his
typing skills at the Bradford Block, then travelled east to New York City. By
this time his Cincinnati achievement had come to the delighted notice of
Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict, manufacturers and sellers of the Remington
typewriter. The Remington people had never had such positive, widespread free publicity
as that generated nationally by the Traub match, and were quick to contact
McGurrin and encourage him – with financial inducements - to stay on in the
east for a while longer. The company out him up in the Astor Hotel. They were
well aware their typewriter’s major test would come up at the first
international championship, in Toronto in mid-August, and wanted McGurrin to
join their official representative, $4000-a-year copyhouse proprieter Mae E.
Orr (real name Mary Orr, 1866-1936) in Canada. Amazingly, Orr was a
two-fingered typist, only using the forefinger on each hand.
A competition had been set up for Wednesday, August 1, by the
Metropolitan Stenography Association of New York at 208 West 21st Street. The
association had sent invitations to compete to Remington, Caligraph and Hammond
on July 2, and all three had accepted. But when news came through that
McGurrin’s Remington had trashed Traub’s Caligraph in Cincinnati, Caligraph and
Hammond immediately withdrew from the New York event. The New York Star reported that McGurrin’s
“unprecedented record … appears to have
had a salutary effect on all rival machines”. Naturally, Wyckoff, Seamans &
Benedict rubbed their hands in glee at this. Orr was the home town favourite,
but was to suffer her first defeat. McGurrin had fewer errors deducted and won
the $25 first prize by scoring 479 in five minutes (95.8wpm) to Orr’s 476
(95.2wpm). After the contest, McGurrin grabbed a book at random from the
association’s library and wrote blindfolded from dictation 101 words in a
minute, still well short of his personal best of 114.5.
Two
days later McGurrin addressed an open letter to the Caligraph’s manufacturer,
the American Writing Machine Company of Hartford, Connecticut, which was
published in The Washington Post. He complained that he had travelled 2500 miles to
take on Caligraph operators, and challenged the AWMC to send a representative,
at McGurrin’s expense, to New York City, offering a prize of up to $500. The
offer wasn’t taken up; Caligraph bided its time until the Toronto
championships. Perhaps it believed that stiffer opposition than he had
encountered in Cincinnati might catch McGurrin by surprise.
McGurrin had suggested tests of 30 minutes or more for his
New York challenge, but he was always willing to “consent” to one-minute exhibition
sprints, which often involved repeating the sentence “Now is the time for all
good men to come to the aid of the party”. McGurrin consistently maintained,
however, that he placed little store in the outcomes of these fast bursts of
typing, and only indulged in them because “operators of rival machines resort
to such one-minute tests in order to produce misleading results. I attach no
importance to them”.
McGurrin’s
barb was at least in part directed at the Caligraph exponent Thomas W. Osborne
(1860-1931), a Philadelphia-born stenographer with Vacuum Oil (and formerly
with Little & Griffith) in Rochester, New York, about whom both the
Caligraph’s manufacturers and the typist himself made some extraordinary speed
typing claims – few of which were borne out by his efforts in competition.
Osborne carried Caligraph’s hopes into the first official
world championships, staged by the Canadian Shorthand Society at the University
of Toronto’s Convocation Hall on Monday, August 13, 1888. The 10 entrants had
to type five minutes of legal testimony and five minutes of ordinary
correspondence, all new matter to them. It did prove a very different
proposition to Cincinnati, but not in terms of an improved Caligraph showing. McGurrin
was unable to hold off Remington teammate Orr, who typed 987 in the 10 minutes
to McGurrin’s 950.11. Osborne was third with 935. George McBride of Ottawa,
also on a Caligraph, finished fifth, a creditable effort given, to his
considerable annoyance, his machine broke down twice.
Notwithstanding the embarrassment its typewriter had caused
McBride, the American Writing Machine Company, makers of the Caligraph, went to
extraordinary lengths (and expense) to try and convince the North American
public that Osborne and Caligraph had triumphed in Toronto. Newspaper
advertisements for the Caligraph blatantly lied, claiming Osborne typed 627 words
correctly and manipulating the true figures outrageously. The subsidiary event
Osborne did “win” was not the world championship itself, for which Orr awarded
a gold medal, but a “memorised sentence” contest. Entrants had been given two
months to memorise “This is a song to fill thee with delight”. Osborne “won” a
silver medal with an average 126.4 “words” a minute, beating McGurrin on
122.66. But what Osborne typed was pure gibberish. At a generous estimate, he
actually typed 144 clear, complete words in five minutes, not the 630.7 gross
(646 net) he was awarded, so his average was in reality was 28.8, almost 100
wpm short of the score given him. Charles Vonley Oden, in his Evolution of the Typewriter (1917), liberally
allowed that Osborne wrote the sentence correctly just twice (18 words), but in
the absolute mess Osborne handed in it is very difficult to make out even that
much. Osborne’s jumbled words place in doubt other efforts he has been credited
with, such as averaging 142.6 wpm in five minutes and typing 179 in one minute
and 99 in 30 seconds at G.S. Walworth’s Typewriting and Stenography Institute
in Brooklyn on February 27, 1889 (typing “This is how I do it” repeatedly).
After this Osborne disappeared from the speed typing front and moved to Hartford,
Connecticut, to take up other lines of work.
Notwithstanding
Caligraph’s nonsense about Osborne’s feats, McGurrin was most unhappy with the
way things had worked out in Toronto.
TO BE CONTINUED
