Bad Ideas
Experts Say Your Fingers Can Type 24/7, Forever, Until You Die
There is no relief on the horizon
Welcome to Bad Ideas, a column in which we examine the practical limits of technology by considering the things you could do, and then investigating exactly why you shouldn’t. Because you can still learn from mistakes you’ll never make.
On the internet there exists a group of people who really love typing. Not writing or posting, but the raw, mechanical act of typing. They spend hours playing competitive typing games like TypeRacer and Nitro Type in an effort to push the limits of what’s possible on a keyboard.
Some, like Sean Wrona — who brought competitive typing briefly into the mainstream after winning the Ultimate Typing Championship at SXSW 2010 — are sprint typists, trying to type as fast and as accurately as humanly possible in short-timed segments. Wrona pecked out an average of 163 words per minute in his 4-minute championship run, back in 2010.
Endurance typists, on the other hand, are pushing the boundary on something far more unknown — just how long can a human physically type for? In these typing marathons, endurance typists try to maximize the amount of time they spend typing in 24 hours. And some, in order to break records, type far longer than the…
