The first typewriter man to interest himself in the system was H. V. Rowell, for many years manager of the Remington office at Boston, who is still living at an advanced age. It was a paper read by Mrs. Longley before the First Annual Congress of Shorthand Writers, held at Cincinnati in 1882, that gave Rowell his first inspiration on the subject, and from that time he became an ardent and constant advocate of the touch system. The first business educator who took up this method at Rowell's suggestion was W. E. Hickox who introduced it in his private shorthand school at Portland, Me. Hickox, who began to teach touch typing in 1882, was the second educator in America and the first in the East to adopt this method, but it was some years before he had any imitators. Rowell, however, continued ceaseless in his efforts, and in 1889 he interested B. J. Griffin of the Springfield Business School, Springfield, Mass. Griffin became a touch typewriting enthusiast. He introduced it in his school to the exclusion of all other methods, and the remarkable typing skill of some of his graduates soon produced a deep impression on other business educators. In the same year, 1889, Bates Torrey of Portland, Me., published "A Manual of Practical Typewriting." The word "touch" seems such a natural one as applied to this method that it would seem almost futile to search for its originator, but, as a matter of fact, Bates Torrey was the first one to use it in a printed manual. We also note in this book a great advance in the point of view over Mrs. Longley's "Typewriter Lessons." Mrs. Longley's method was a genuine touch system in its results, but not in its main purpose, which was avowedly to secure an improved method of fingering. Seven years later the all-finger method had become simply a means to an end--the ability to write by touch. The developments of the year 1889 set the ball rolling, and during the next few years many new "touch" manuals appeared and one school after another took it up until the touch method was firmly established in the East. The growth of the system in the West was due mainly to the efforts of another typewriter man, O. P. Judd, for many years manager of the Remington office in Omaha. Judd, writing in 1897, says that "Omaha has become the storm center of the commotion over the touch method of typewriting." Two educators of that city, Van Sant and Mosher, urged on by Judd, entered into a friendly competition, and the rival exhibitions given by their splendidly trained pupils soon spread the method far and wide.