The developments of the year 1889 set the ball rolling, and during the next few years many new “touch” manuals appeared and one school after another took it up until the touch method was firmly established in the East. The growth of the system in the West was due mainly to the efforts of another typewriter man, O. P. Judd, for many years manager of the Remington office in Omaha. Judd, writing in 1897, says that “Omaha has become the storm center of the commotion over the touch method of typewriting.” Two educators of that city, Van Sant and Mosher, urged on by Judd, entered into a friendly competition, and the rival exhibitions given by their splendidly trained pupils soon spread the method far and wide.
Early in the year 1901 the Remingtons made a complete canvass of the schools of America to ascertain definitely the extent to which the touch system was then in use. It was found that half of the schools of the country had already begun instruction by the touch method and, of the remainder, the great majority announced their intention of doing so with the beginning of the fall term. Very soon after, the old “peck and hunt” plan of teaching had disappeared entirely from the schools, and the old style operators have become fewer and fewer with each passing year until one of them in a present-day business office is almost a curiosity. The seeming impossibility of thirty-five years ago, when people watched McGurrin and wondered, has become the universal commonplace of today.
CHAPTER VII.
WIDENING THE FIELD
The developments we have been considering cover only one phase of typewriter progress. The advent of the shift-key typewriter, of the automatic ribbon reverse, of visible writing, of the touch system, and finally of the quiet typewriter, have all been important advances in efficiency, or convenience, or general satisfaction in the performance of the older and more familiar typing tasks. Those improvements, however, the aim of which was to extend the actual scope and range of the writing machine belong, in the main, to a different chain of typewriter development.
During the first twenty-five years of its history, the time-saving service of the typewriter was confined almost entirely to straight, line-by-line writing, with its practical applications, such as letter writing, manuscript writing, and the like. So long as these fields remained unconquered there was little incentive or opportunity to think of anything else. Thus the great fields of form, tabular and statistical writing remained for many years beyond the reach of the writing machine. The reason, of course, from the mechanical standpoint, lay in the lack of any mechanism for the instantaneous setting of the carriage at any desired writing point. Whenever the nature of the work required these carriage settings with great frequency, the slow method of hand setting consumed all the time that could be saved in the actual typing. However, as time went on, the opportunities for time saving in these special forms of writing became more and more evident. “If we have typewritten letters, why not typewritten bills and statements and vouchers and statistical forms of every kind? Why, in fact, use the pen at all except for signatures?” These questions were asked with greater and greater frequency. And in due time the typewriter builders gave the answer. The first decimal tabulator, known originally as the Gorin Tabulator, from the name of its inventor, appeared in 1898 as an attachment of the Remington Typewriter.
There is a special interest in the date of this invention, for it marks exactly the half-way point in the fifty years of typewriter history. The second quarter century of this period, which begins with the advent of the decimal tabulator, has seen the typewriter extend its range to every form of writing or combined writing and adding formerly done by the pen.
The Gorin Tabulator was exactly what its name implies—a decimal tabulator. It wrote columns of figures—anywhere on the page and as many as the page would hold—with the same speed as ordinary, line-by-line writing. The decimal tabulator brought the carriage instantly to the exact point in every column where the next line of writing began, whether units, tens, hundreds or millions, as illustrated in the following example:
| 340721 | 5 | 3 721 55 |
| 856 | 29 | 8 06 |
| 7382 | 767 | 952 77 |
| 94006 | 9 763 | 85 |
| 73 | 86 573 | 95 00 |
| 2099 | 142 345 | 48 050 66 |
| 9282384650 | 4 356 758 | 1 396 722 00 |
| 5857205 | 67 954 678 | 500 800 00 |