Monday, August 07, 2006

Now Cincinnati had another typewriting teacher besides Mrs. Longley, a certain Louis Taub, who took a poor view of ten-fingered typists. He believed, like the editors of the Cosmopolitan Shorthander, that four fingers were plenty. Moreover, Taub thought that the Remington and Remington's shift for capital letters was outmoded by the Caligraph and Caligraph's double keyboard with its two keys per letter, one upper- and the other lower-case. Finally, Taub felt reasonably certain that he was the fastest typewriter operator in the world. -- Bruce Bliven, Jr.: The Wonderful Writing Machine, Random House, New York (1954), p.114.

His name was Louis Traub, not Taub. When Mrs. Elizabeth Margaret Vater Longley left Cincinnati to Los Angeles in May, 1885, she transferred her Shorthand and Type-Writer Institute to two of her pupils, Messrs. William H. Wagner and Louis Traub. Mr. Louis Traub mainly operated Caligraph No.2 at that time, but he never believed that four fingers were plenty. He was after Mrs. M. V. Longley and used her eight-finger method on Caligraph No.2. Thus he could operate Caligraph No.2 with a blank keyboard. Mr. Traub exhibited his skill with the blank keyboard at the Cincinnati Exposition in 1886 and at the Indiana State Fair in 1887 (cf. History of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, Ohio; S. B. Nelson, Cincinnati (1894), pp.735-737). Mr. Bliven's story about "Louis Taub" is nothing but a fiction.

2 Comments:

Blogger C.T. Pope said...

Hello,

While I do appreciate your commitment to accuaracy, my blog is mostly satire. 95% of the quotes and dates that I present are fiction with bits of truth. As far as the spelling of Traub is concerned, the wikipedia entry on touch-typing misspells it, which is where I got the name. So, you might want to go to wiki and fix it.

Later,
CT Pope

Tuesday, August 08, 2006 3:43:00 PM  
Blogger Koichi Yasuoka said...

Thank you, Mr. Pope. I've just fixed the Touch typing entry of Wikipedia.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006 2:38:00 PM  

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