Typing With The Wind: One Underwood Master Typewriter, 12 Typists, 7.8 Million Keystrokes in Two Weeks

Richard Polt's Underwood Master

Using just the one typewriter, an Underwood Master, at the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto in 1938, 12 typists typed 1,560,341 words from Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. The exercise, sponsored by Underwood to prove how efficient and durable its new Willie Dobson-designed standard model was, turned out to be a huge publicity success.

Mitchell’s book, ironically typed on a Remington portable No 3, is 1472 pages long, contains 426,590 words and takes the average reader 28 hours, 26 minutes to get through, at 250 words a minute. The Underwood typing team of 12, six women and six men, completed copying it three times and were up to page 729, going through it a fourth time, when the “world’s first typing marathon” ended.

The typists had completed a first copy of Mitchell’s novel within 94 hours, 22 minutes, on the fifth day of the event. They typed a lot faster after that. The marathon lasted 14 days without stops, from 12 noon on Friday, August 26, to 12 midnight, on Saturday, September 10, 1938. The 12 typists each typed for one hour twice a day, their shifts coming day and night. They changed place behind the one Underwood Master 1295 times. In all they typed for 324 hours, at 4816 words an hour, or 80.3 words a minute. They employed 7,801,705 keystrokes on 5480 sheets of paper.

*This picture was taken before the marathon; there were two changes to the team which typed in Toronto.

The typists were: Men – Charles White (captain) 139,599 words; Alexander Orr 132,077; John Newman 121,474; Edwin Amsden 119,654; Delmar Dodge 116,687; Arthur Ballard 115,554. Total 745,044. Women – Irma Wright (captain, right) 170,402 words; Margaret Faulkner 168,598; Elda McColl 126,637; Margaret Ward 124,326; Wilma Alexander 119,277; Frieda Laidlaw 106,057. Total 815,297. Grand total 1,560,341.

The next year, 1939, the event was turned into a United States versus Canada contest. The US won the first of these, typing a net (after deductions for errors) 1,596,243 words on 7531 sheets of paper from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, 348,000 words on 1392 pages (23 hours, 12 minutes to read). Canada typed 1,560,577 words. The US average words per minute was 82.1 and Canada 80.2. In 1940 teams representing to two nations copied from H.G. Wells’ Outline of History, 1170 pages of it. Canada won with a net score of 1,654,744 (87.7 words a minute) to the US’s 1,537,708 (82.2). Katherine Gray, office manager of that year’s New York World’s Fair, used an estimate of three pounds of energy for each keystroke on a manual typewriter to calculate that 24,174 tons of energy would be used in the contest. She claimed an electric typewriter would require only two ounces of energy. Canada retained the international trophy in 1941, typing from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Public Papers and Addresses at an average of 88.34 wpm to the US’s 88.26.

Above, the 1940 US v Canada contest

Below, the 1938 typists

The Toronto typing arena.