- Jul 2024
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Local file Local file
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Weller, Charles Edward. The Early History of the Typewriter. Chase & Shepard, printers, 1918. http://archive.org/details/earlyhistorytyp00wellgoog.
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The keys beingattached to the type bars and working inunison with the carriage movement enabledus for the first time to test the work ofprinting words and sentences. We werethen in the midst of an exciting politicalcampaign, and it was then for the first timethat the well known sentence was inaugu-rated,—"*Now is the time for all good mento come to the aid of the party;” also theopening sentence of the Declaration of In-dependence, ““When in the course of humanevents,” etc., which sentences were repeat-ed many times in order to test the speed ofthe machine.
While some sources indicate that "Now is the time..." was used as an early typing exercise, Charles Weller in his book on the history of typewriters indicates it, along with the opening of the Declaration of Independence, was "repeated many times in order to test the speed of the [typewriter] machine.
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I have been describing the actions of themachine in some of its worst moods. Butdon’t imagine for a moment that this was acontinuous affair. There were times wheneverything worked beautifully, and _ thespeed that could be gotten out of it at suchtimes was something marvelous, especiallywhen we got onto that familiar centence,“Now is the time for all good men to cometo the aid of the party.”
More recent typing books use a variant: “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country”. This version fills out a 70-space line if you count the period at the end.
General lore has it that Charles Weller used the phrase as a typing exercise in the early 1900s.
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www.straightdope.com www.straightdope.com
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Who originated, “Now is the time for all good men …” by [[Cecil Adams]] dated 1977-09-15 in The Straight Dope
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