Remington's typing contests opened clerical work to anyone with speed

Before the typewriter, clerical hiring ran on reputation and connection: a clerk's 'fair hand' and a family recommendation opened the ledger-room door, a system that had also kept the trade almost entirely male, since those networks ran through men's schools and men's firms.

Remington and rival makers began staging public typewriting contests in the 1880s to sell machines, timed and judged in front of audiences and newspapers, with a numeric words-per-minute score any spectator could verify — a real, witnessed sample of the exact skill the new clerical jobs required.

At the 1888 Cincinnati contest, Frank McGurrin publicly typed over 100 words per minute using touch typing on a QWERTY keyboard, beating a hunt-and-peck rival in front of witnesses; the recorded score, not McGurrin's background, was what businesses and manufacturers then used to recruit and advertise typists.

Publicly timed a typing contest and published the score, turning skill into a verifiable number that any employer could recruit from, bypassing family connections.

A witnessed score is hard to fake, so it beats a family claim.

Newspapers spread the score, so employers could hire without knowing the winner.

The number measured the exact skill the job needed, not a proxy.

Women, excluded from old networks, could compete on speed alone.

When a trade hires on connections, a public, witnessed, numeric performance test can let outsiders in.

By 1900 women, nearly shut out of clerical work two decades before, were three-quarters of the nation's 100,000 typists, hired on speed. The typing test became a permanent fixture of clerical hiring for the next century, and the public contest that established it is credited as one of the first times an entire white-collar occupation opened to whoever could pass a measurable performance test instead of whoever had the right connections.