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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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