The Biggest Scandal In Speed Typing History

As a former newspaper journalist, I must say your work is brilliant, Karl. You always dig deeper and don’t assume something is true just because a book says so. Many journalists could learn a thing or two from you.

Hey, Sean Wrona here. Thanks for the shoutout. When I was writing my book, the more research I did on Blackburn the more I too was skeptical about her claims. There were a number of other champion typists who were frequently listed in Guinness World Records sections in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s like Margaret Owen, Albert Tangora, Margaret Hamma, Stella Pajunas, and Michael Shestov. In all of those cases, those typists had an extremely large paper trail when I did my own research trawling through newspaper archive sites. These typists (especially Owen and even more so Tangora) were actually pretty big celebrities in their heydays and toured America doing hundreds or thousands of typing demonstrations throughout their careers. Their records were talked about in newspapers at the time when they set them and they all got a lot of press before and after. What I noticed when I looked up Blackburn was that she basically got no press coverage whatsoever until after her record was initially placed in the book and it was nearly impossible for me to verify the records she supposedly set (I had the same issue evaluating a lot of the claims I read about Cortez Peters, Jr. but I believe he was more legitimate than she was.) That did trigger my suspicions and I did basically conclude in my book that the whole thing was a marketing stunt for the Dvorak keyboard but ultimately that I didn’t really care because I felt the way Letterman made a mockery of her on set was honestly worse than what she herself did and after I got so many nasty comments on the more-viral-than-I-hoped Ultimate Typing Championship videos, I kind of felt for her as a fellow public laughingstock, but I did already know that most of her claims were impossible to verify and I never trusted the Guinness Book of World Records to begin with (the World Almanac was always my favorite reference book as a kid, and it was always way better.)

It is frustrating when you see people who have done only a cursory level of research who just *automatically* assume alternative layouts are better (even celebrated nonfiction writers like Stephen Jay Gould, who also propagated inaccurate myths on the QWERTY and Dvorak keyboards), particularly those who get so loyal about their layouts that they sneer at QWERTY users as if we’re backward even though almost all typing records ever have been set on QWERTY (this is certainly a vast minority of alt-layout advocates to be fair, but this happens whenever there is any kind of underdog narrative in the media even if it is a fairly astroturfed one like the Dvorak movement seems to be.) As far as I can tell, Colemak is a better alt-layout anyway since at least it puts all the most frequently used letters in the center row if you believe that is a strength (and I have my doubts about that personally) while Dvorak has a few letters that are not among the most frequently used in the center row. I think Blackburn was a very nice but flawed person and kind of feel sad for her that she got roped into this and was made to be a mockery on national television, but I also get how it made her one of the only 20th century typists anybody cares about.

Because Late Night with David Letterman was regarded as one of the classic television shows of that period and because he frequently replayed the Blackburn segments, they were very widely seen and since the series was iconic, it was only inevitable that it would survive on YouTube even though a *lot* of footage from talk shows, news reports, and newsmagazines from this era has been seemingly lost to history (try and find an episode of 60 Minutes from the early ’90s when it was one of the most popular TV shows on the planet – almost impossible…) I personally don’t really like the effect Letterman ultimately had on culture. As a very earnest person who hates that the default mode of Internet discourse is an endless parade of mockery, irony, and snarkiness, I do see his show as the root of popularizing a lot of this stuff and the beginning of the end of earnestness in culture, and I think Blackburn herself was definitely taken aback since she came from Letterman’s parents’ generation, which was a lot more prim and proper and rather opposed to irreverence. Letterman was a boomer whose entire show was about deflating the egos of his parents’ generation and I don’t think Blackburn was the sort of person who even ever would have watched it, so I don’t think she knew what she was in for and you can see how uncomfortable she was as a result. I guess what I’m saying is for these reasons, I’d go easier on her personally than you probably did even though I likewise know she did not set most of the records ascribed to her.

She was not the only typist who appeared on television by the way (Ron Mingo and Cortez Peters, Jr. also did, and they were also frequently cited as the fastest typists in the world in their heyday) but she is the only one who is remembered because Letterman itself is remembered, while a LOT of the history of television is lost simply because few people bothered to archive nonfiction material on television (yeah, you can find most scripted shows probably if you try hard enough, but it seems that talk shows and news shows and the like are a lot more ephemeral and probably all that material is rotting in some studio lot somewhere.) The fact that she was on Letterman is why people still remember her while the fact that nobody remembers the Flip Wilson Show (even though they really should since it was the first popular variety show hosted by a black man) means that Ron Mingo is forgotten, even though his records (which were never listed in Guinness because he never bothered I guess) are a lot more verifiable and a lot more legitimate. Another factor here is that people tend to only remember the initial report on a story and almost nobody pays any attention to the retractions, especially if it’s something like competitive typing which literally nobody cared about in the 1980s (although there is a hardcore contingent who do now.)

I wouldn’t be so quick to compare today’s records to the records in her era though. Back then, I don’t think anyone typed random lists of words with no capital letters or punctuation like you see on Monkeytype or 10FastFingers today. I believe most people in the 20th century would have seen that as not being real typing so I do think the material that the typists of her era had to type was much harder than what Rocket is typing now. Having said that, I would agree that the best typists today are better than she was. I think I was better than she was in my heyday, even though there are a handful of people faster overall now. There are people now who dream of being the world’s fastest typist, which was not even a thing when I was a kid and it was even less of one when Blackburn became famous. Obviously when there are so many people gunning to set records that nobody cared about 40 years ago, the stakes are going to be raised considerably. I think the best millennial typists like myself and zoomers like Rocket are well past Blackburn. But I do think the material they had to type was usually harder and obviously earlier typewriters were more primitive and cumbersome to use (it certainly takes a great deal more physical strength to make a keypress on a mechanical typewriter than on a computer) so I think people should have a little more respect for that era as a result. Having said that, I have in general more respect for the mechanical typewriter typists of the early 20th century like Margaret Owen, Albert Tangora, and George Hossfield, who were a lot more groundbreaking than Blackburn ever was and they used machines that were significantly more difficult to operate. Maybe none of them could have done what Rocket or I did later on computers, but I don’t really think we would have been able to do what they did in their era either. And in the first half of the 20th century, typing really was a big deal when the top typists of the time were probably bigger niche celebrities than I am actually. People definitely care more about typing as a competitive pursuit than they have since World War II, but I still think the scene in the 1920s might have been bigger when the top typists went on nationwide tours and made huge incomes for the time. The incentives of that era convince me that maybe the best typists of that era might have been better than the best typists of today, but that’s probably incorrect since there are WAY more people competing now. Through all my research, I did come to respect most of the 20th century typists a great deal, but it does disappoint me that the most famous 20th century typist is neither the best nor the most legitimate one. Why does Barbara Blackburn have a Wikipedia page while George Hossfield does not?

Sorry to ramble on like this but I did think this was all necessary to say to provide context for this as well as my own research (I see that you did cite some of the articles I shared with you in addition to my book.) Once again, thanks for the shoutout. And yeah, the other commenters mentioned this but you did mispronounce Dvorak. It is ‘Duh/vor/ak’, an Americanized form, not ‘Duh/vor/zhak’ like the composer. It’s an easy mistake to make though ’cause the composer is way more famous regardless of the Dvorak keyboard advocates’ relentless self-promotion.