The Typewriter Maestro You’ve Never Heard Of

Try this: close your eyes, place your fingers on a keyboard, and type “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Your left hand’s pinky hits Q, your right index finds J with that satisfying little bump. You didn’t think about it. Your fingers just knew the dance.

That dance has a name—touch typing. And its modern form owes a quiet, uncredited debt to a man you’ve probably never heard of: Frank Edward McGurrin. No, not Christopher Sholes (the QWERTY guy). Not the IBM Selectric engineers. McGurrin was a federal court stenographer in Grand Rapids, Michigan, who, in the late 1870s, more or less invented the idea of typing by feel.

But here’s the twist: he didn’t leave a patent for the method. He left a patent for something far stranger—a typewriter key arrangement that nobody uses today. And yet, without his forgotten 1881 patent, your fingers might still be hunting and pecking.

The Famous Basement Duel

Let’s rewind. In 1888, the world of typing was a circus. Typists were showmen. Companies held speed contests like prizefights. The reigning champion was a two-fingered “sight” typist named Louis Taub, who used a Caligraph typewriter and watched each key press. McGurrin—using a Remington—had taught himself a radical new system: he memorized the keyboard layout entirely. He typed with all ten fingers, eyes fixed on his copy paper.

The showdown happened in a Cincinnati basement. McGurrin won handily, hitting 95 words per minute. Taub hit 80. More importantly, McGurrin’s method—no looking at the keys—caught fire. Typing schools popped up. “Ten-finger blind typing” became the gold standard.

But here’s the messy part of history: McGurrin never patented the method of touch typing. The concept of “home row” and muscle memory? He just did it and taught it. The patent that changed everything was a different, earlier piece of paper—one that most historians ignore.

The 1881 Patent Nobody Wanted

Let’s look at US Patent 248,162, filed by McGurrin in 1881, years before his famous duel. The title is dry as cardboard: Improvement in Type-Writing Machines. The drawing shows a weird, split keyboard. Instead of the standard QWERTY rows, McGurrin grouped the letters into two distinct blocks—one for the left hand, one for the right—with a big gap in the middle. He was trying to solve a physical problem: the old typewriter’s keybars were constantly jamming, and he wanted to spread them out.

The patent didn’t catch on. Remington ignored it. The split design died on paper.

But look closer at the filing text. McGurrin wrote something curiously prophetic:

“The operator, after a little practice, can strike the key with any finger without glancing at the keyboard, the position of each key being learned by the touch alone.”

That phrase—“learned by the touch alone”—is the first known acknowledgment in any patent that a keyboard could be operated blindly by muscle memory. Nobody had formally claimed that before. Not Sholes. Not anyone.

How a Dead Patent Birthed Modern Typing

For years, the 1881 patent sat in the US Patent Office vault, a historical footnote. But its DNA seeped into the next generation of typewriter designers. By 1893, companies like Underwood began selling machines with “universal” keyboards that prioritized finger travel distances. They didn’t cite McGurrin’s patent—but they did start including the subtle homing bumps on the F and J keys that we still use today.

And that home row concept? It’s the direct descendant of McGurrin’s principle: your fingers must have a default anchor point. In his patent drawing, the two-hand split naturally forced your thumbs to rest near the space bar, your fingertips hovering over different letter blocks. Sound familiar? That’s just the QWERTY home row by another name.

The final piece of the puzzle: the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard (1936) and its modern successor Colemak (2006) both rely entirely on this same “touch-learned” principle. They assumed you’d keep your hands still and memorize key positions—exactly the idea McGurrin first wrote into a patent 130 years ago.

The Real Legacy? It’s Under Your Fingertips Right Now

Frank McGurrin died in 1938, his 1881 patent long expired. He never became a household name like Thomas Edison or even Remington’s company men. But every time you rest your index fingers on those bumps, every time you type a sentence without looking down, you’re using his core insight: the keyboard isn’t something to be seen—it’s something to be felt.

His patent was technically a failure. His method became a world standard.

Next time you blaze through an email in silence, give a quiet nod to a court reporter from Grand Rapids who, in a clunky 1881 drawing, figured out that the best way to use a machine is to stop looking at it entirely.