How it all began . . .

The need for speed or rapid reading can be traced to the early 1900’s, when the information explosion swamped readers with more than they could possibly handle at their existing reading rates.

Help came from an unexpected source . . . the First World War!

Air force tacticians found that many pilots were unable to quickly distinguish between enemy and their own aircrafts seen at a distance. In the life and death situation of air combat, this inability was obviously a major disadvantage, and the air force tacticians had to find a solution to the problem.

A specially commissioned team developed a machine called a tachistoscope, a device for flashing images for varying lengths of time on a large screen. They started by flashing fairly large pictures of friendly and enemy aircraft at very slow exposures. They then gradually shortened the exposure while decreasing the size, and changing the angle of the image.

Eventually the pilots were able to recognise different kinds of aircraft at speeds so fast that they could not possibly have noted the four different parts of the aircraft separately – wings, fuselage, engine and tail, which differ from aircraft to aircraft - and assemble them to decide if the pursuing aircraft was friend or foe. The average pilot could distinguish between pictures of different aircraft flashed on the screen for only one five-hundredth of a second.

This was the breakthrough! if it was possible for the eyes to see at this amazing speed, then reading speeds could be vastly improved! They soon set about transferring this information to the field of reading.

Using the same process, they first flashed one word in large type size for five seconds on a screen, gradually reducing the size of the word and shortening the length of the flash. Like the pilots the new ‘ reading students’ were soon able to read four words flashed simultaneously on the screen for one five-hundredth of a second.

The outcome of those encouraging results was that most early speed reading programmes were based on tachistoscope training, where students were able to climb from an average of two hundred words per minute to an average of four hundred words per minute. This must have sounded amazing, but the maths was flawed . . . if the eye was able to recognise words in one five-hundredth of a second then the expected reading rate in one minute should be 30,000 words! (60 seconds X 500 words per second) What had happened to the other 29,600 words!

In addition, many students of this training noticed that shortly after the course had finished, their reading speed once again sank to its previous level. For these reasons the validity of the tachistoscopic method was brought into question.

One explanation for its failure is that it used a still screen with no requirement for the eye to move. It is true that the basic rule of observation states: in order to see something clearly, the eye must be still in relation to the object it is seeing. However, with so many words on a page, the eye clearly has to move.

If the eye is required to be both still and to move, the two must be put into sequence. In other words, the eye must be still to take in a word or group of words, and then must move on to the next group of words. The eye must therefore be trained not only in seeing an image very quickly, but also in moving quickly. This realisation formed the basis of a new approach in the field of speed reading.

By the 1960’s researchers had discovered that with adequate training this was possible . . . and speeds well over 1,000 words per minute with increased comprehension were achieved!