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Short History of Speed Reading

By Adam Harley

How did speed reading come about? When did it start? All this and more in today’s article!

It all began with the invention of the tachistoscope – a machine that could flash a series of images at varying speeds on a screen. With the use of the tachistoscope it was found that an average person could correctly identify minute images flashed on the screen, even if the image only appeared for one-five-hundredth of a second!

The U.S Air Force recognized the implication of this discovery, and wanted to be able to use this knowledge to make their fighter pilots more efficient. Receiving orders by a quick flash on a screen would be much faster than listening to the orders on the radio. A series of experiments were conducted using words instead of images, to test whether or not this was possible. The results clearly demonstrated the potential of the human eye to read at speeds that were previously unthinkable. Sadly for the military, they did not have the proper technology to put their ideas into use.

In the years that followed, much interest was generated on this subject and many courses were developed that claimed to increase the reading speeds of participants. These mostly relied on training eye movements with a variety of exercises using the tachistoscope in an attempt to increase reading speed. However the results were short lived as reading speeds rapidly diminished when reading without the machine.

It was not until the 1950s that a reliable technique for speed reading was developed. The inventor was a school teacher named Evelyn Wood. She made her remarkable breakthrough almost by accident, when she noticed how her eyes smoothly followed the movement of her hand as she moved it across the page. She then wrote a whole book about how you can read faster by simply guiding your eye with your hand. It became known as the “Evelyn Wood method”.

Since then, speed reading has gained widespread recognition, partly due to some famous users of speed reading, such as President John F Kennedy. But in today’s world, speed reading is becoming more and more important; the benefits of mastering the skill in today’s hectic environment are probably ten times what they were 50 years ago. With the boom in demand for individuals with high education, people need to read more than they ever had to before.

Luckily, there’s no shortage of information for learning how to speed read. One popular site, for example, is called “Speed Reading Is Real.” New articles are posted almost every day, giving new tips and techniques for improving your reading speed without harming your comprehension. Click here to go to that site now: http://www.speedreadingisreal.com/

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Evelyn Wood was the one to coin the term “speed reading“, and she helped develop one of the earliest speed reading books, called “Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics”, published in 1959.

She spent 2 years touring around the world finding people who knew how to speed read, and she studied the tactics of all of them. She even managed to find some people who could read over 1500 words per minute – keep in mind that the average reading speed is 250 words per minute. Evelyn wood once wrote: “The purpose of reading is to get the information, feeling, and understanding the author is trying to convey.” If you’re able to grasp that from a text, then you’re taking in everything the author could ever want you to take in.

Although Evelyn Wood passed away in 1995, her speed reading program “Reading Dynamics” is still up and running. If I’m not mistaken, that program still teaches in a classroom-type environment. It might be difficult to schedule a lesson with them, but if you’re in the USA and you’ve got some free time, you might want to check it out!

There is also a program you can order online, but it’s preposterously expensive. There are different versions of it, but the cheapest one I found cost $199.95. (Not a good price!)

I really respect Evelyn Wood and what she’s done for the world. Her research gave a jumpstart to the credibility and to the popularity of speed reading all over the world. If it weren’t for her, this website might not exist!

So now you know some history on speed reading, and if anyone ever asks you who Evelyn Wood was, you’ll have the answer!