Early in the year 1901 the Remingtons made a complete canvass of the schools of America to ascertain definitely the extent to which the touch system was then in use. It was found that half of the schools of the country had already begun instruction by the touch method and, of the remainder, the great majority announced their intention of doing so with the beginning of the fall term. Very soon after, the old "peck and hunt" plan of teaching had disappeared entirely from the schools, and the old style operators have become fewer and fewer with each passing year until one of them in a present-day business office is almost a curiosity. The seeming impossibility of thirty-five years ago, when people watched McGurrin and wondered, has become the universal commonplace of today. CHAPTER VII. WIDENING THE FIELD The developments we have been considering cover only one phase of typewriter progress. The advent of the shift-key typewriter, of the automatic ribbon reverse, of visible writing, of the touch system, and finally of the quiet typewriter, have all been important advances in efficiency, or convenience, or general satisfaction in the performance of the older and more familiar typing tasks. Those improvements, however, the aim of which was to extend the actual scope and range of the writing machine belong, in the main, to a different chain of typewriter development. During the first twenty-five years of its history, the time-saving service of the typewriter was confined almost entirely to straight, line-by-line writing, with its practical applications, such as letter writing, manuscript writing, and the like. So long as these fields remained unconquered there was little incentive or opportunity to think of anything else. Thus the great fields of form, tabular and statistical writing remained for many years beyond the reach of the writing machine. The reason, of course, from the mechanical standpoint, lay in the lack of any mechanism for the instantaneous setting of the carriage at any desired writing point. Whenever the nature of the work required these carriage settings with great frequency, the slow method of hand setting consumed all the time that could be saved in the actual typing. However, as time went on, the opportunities for time saving in these special forms of writing became more and more evident. "If we have typewritten letters, why not typewritten bills and statements and vouchers and statistical forms of every kind? Why, in fact, use the pen at all except for signatures?" These questions were asked with greater and greater frequency. And in due time the typewriter builders gave the answer. The first decimal tabulator, known originally as the Gorin Tabulator, from the name of its inventor, appeared in 1898 as an attachment of the Remington Typewriter.