Shaffer found that even when one arm was in a cast he could still type fast enough one handed to beat average typists. Horn set an early record on TypeRacer of 212 words a minute that stood for over a year.īorn with a brittle bone disorder that caused hundreds of broken bones and an opiate dependence to manage the pain, Mr. Suddenly users could compete with each other in real time. Horn said it wasn’t until 2008, when TypeRacer started, that the typing scene really took shape. The game presented scrambled words that users had to guess, type and send to a chat room as quickly as possible.Ī few typing apps appeared in the late 2000s, but Mr. Noah Horn, a music professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, had no idea he was entering that world when, as a high school student, he joined a popular AOL game called Scrambler.

Wrona said.Ĭompetitive typing emerged online in the late 1990s. “This was a pretty massive thing that has almost been entirely forgotten,” Mr. The events were usually tied to business conventions and drew thousands of spectators some champions became celebrities and toured the country. Typewriter manufacturers, eager to test and market their wares, held well-funded and highly publicized typing competitions at venues such as Madison Square Garden. Wrona decided to write a book on the subject and was surprised to learn typing contests emerged as early as the late 1880s and became popular in the 1920s. Although he’d largely stepped away from competitive typing, Mr. He’s widely regarded in the typing community as the greatest typist of the modern era. Wrona went on to win the Ultimate Typing Championship in 2010, a global contest sponsored by a keyboard manufacturer.

Fastest typist in the world