In 1888, most typewriter operators worked the same way most computer users do today: they looked at the keyboard and used whatever fingers were convenient. Frank Edward McGurrin was different.
Who Was McGurrin?
Frank Edward McGurrin was a court stenographer from Salt Lake City, Utah. He had taught himself to type using all ten fingers without looking at the keyboard — a method he apparently developed independently, though the historical record is incomplete on who, if anyone, taught him the technique.
The 1888 Competition
On July 25, 1888, McGurrin competed against Louis Taub in Cincinnati. Taub used a Caligraph typewriter (which had a full visible keyboard) and typed with four fingers while looking at the keys. McGurrin used a Remington and typed with all ten fingers from memory.
McGurrin won both the speed and accuracy portions of the competition. His performance was witnessed by journalists, and reports spread widely — demonstrating publicly that the ten-finger, no-look method was superior to the standard practice of the day.
Legacy
After McGurrin's victory, typing schools began adopting and teaching the home-row method. The demonstration had a disproportionate effect on how typing was taught in the following decades. By the 1910s, the ten-finger touch method had become the professional standard.
The principles McGurrin demonstrated are unchanged today — the same home row anchoring, the same finger assignments, the same fundamental insight that typing by feel rather than sight is faster and less cognitively demanding.
Read the full history on our touch typing history page.