Lenore Fenton MacClain
American champion typist
Lenore Lillian Fenton MacClain was an American championship typist and typewriting educator. She won numerous international typewriting awards and international records in typing.
Biography
MacClain was from Snohomish, Washington. After briefly attending Whitman College, she graduated from the University of Washington with undergraduate and master's degrees She worked as a high school teacher and married George MacClain, a colonel in the U.S. Army, in the late 1940s.
Typing contests
In 1937 MacClain won a novice typing award with a speed of 87 words per minute. She won again in 1938, and in 1939 she broke her own transcription record and earned the title of "the world's greatest secretary". Earlier, she won the world championship on a Dvorak keyboard in Tenth Annual International Commercial Schools Contest in Chicago, June 19, 1946, by typing 131 net words per minute. In 1956, Popular Science noted that she had won so many typing contests that she cancelled additional contests. MacClain was listed in the 1971 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records for being the fastest typist in a one-hour timed test.
She became one of the students of August Dvorak and upon switching from a QWERTY layout to the Dvorak keyboard layout, MacClain increased her typing rate from 70 words per minute to 182 words per minute.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lenore Fenton MacClain” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.