In the context of text messaging, being all thumbs is not a bad thing. Just ask Marcel Fernandes Filho, a 17-year-old from Brazil, who broke the Guinness World Record for Faster Texter on April 25, 2014. Using a Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphone with the keyboard app Fleksy, Filho typed a 160-character message in just 18.19 seconds — an astounding 8.79 characters per second! When you convert that to words per minute (where five characters equals one word), his record translates to a very impressive 105.6 words per minute! Those are some fast thumbs!
The record for fastest texter was previously held by Gaurav Sharma, a 15-year-old from Seattle, who typed the same 160-character text message in 18.44 seconds in January 2014. (Incidentally the message that the record holders typed was: “The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serrasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human.”)
To put Filho’s amazing texting speed in perspective, here is how long it would take him to text some of the longest novels in the world:
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1,267,069 words): 199.9 hours
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (561,304 words): 88.6 hours
Les Miserable by Victor Hugo (530,982 words): 83.8 hours
Ulysses by James Joyce (265,222 words): 41.8 hours
Moby Dick by Herman Melville (206,052 words): 32.5 hours
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (47,094): 7.4 hours
As impressive as Filho’s texting speed is, it pales in comparison to the world’s fastest typist. By using ten fingers, as opposed to only two thumbs, Stella Pajunas-Garnand from Chicago typed a jaw dropping 216 words per minute — twice the speed of the fastest texter, and about four times faster than the average typist (average typing speed is about 50 words per minute). Garnand set her record back in 1946 using an IBM electric typewriter (remember those clunky beasts?).
Read related posts: Famous Epic Novels by the Numbers
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The Power of Literature
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For further reading: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/worlds-fastest-texter/
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