Not necessary, you might think, to sate most of our needs to bash out a few emails. But speed-typing has been a prized skill since at least the early 1900s, when Rose L. Fitz – a 17-year-old American fresh out of stenography school – was named the world’s fastest; in 1908, the then-Prince of Wales (later George V) watched her reach 113wpm without error, on a sheet he asked her to autograph. Speed-typing’s cachet kept climbing; halls filled with competitive typists spread across North America by the 1930s, with hopefuls often adorning their desks with the trophies they had accrued.
The advent of computers in the 1970s didn’t dent that, but rather sped it up. The layout of the QWERTY keyboard (so named for the first six characters on the top row) was lifted from the first commercially successful typewriter, which had reached the market a century earlier – and still, little has changed. Dvorak attempted to unseat it in the mid-1930s, with an ergonomic design that spread the typing evenly across each hand (QWERTY is almost 60 per cent left-reliant); its middle row can create 3,000 common English words, compared to the sub-100 of its predecessor. It was championed by Barbara Blackburn, who in 1985 broke and then maintained the Guinness World Record as the world’s fastest typist, reaching 150wpm over 50 minutes. She was later invited on to The David Letterman Show to exhibit her skills to an audience of 17 million.
For the mere mortal, 40wpm is the norm on a QWERTY. “The fastest people I’ve seen have been legal secretaries and they’re typing at around 120wpm,” says Darryl Samuels, course coordinator at Souters, which provides touch-typing lessons as part of its secretarial diplomas. “To get a really fast speed you need to touch-type” – that is, writing with eyes ahead, rather than looking at the characters you are pressing. The growth of this training created a major workplace shift, enabling women to enter the workforce at pace; taught in schools, commonly via the Mavis Beacon programme, touch-typing formed a part of the curriculum until the last decade (though Eton and the independent Brighton College are among the few that retain it on theirs). Since 2016, teaching touch-typing has been a legal mandate in all Finnish schools.
In spite of a smattering of competitors, though, and the rise of predictive text on our phones and computers, QWERTY remains the global front-runner – even virtual devices retain its same layout on-screen. It is simply too expensive and time-consuming, experts say, for the world to try and kick its QWERTY habit now.
