Evelyn Wood, the most influential exponent of speed reading since the mid-20th century, began doing research on speed reading while employed as a remedial reading teacher at a junior high school near Salt Lake City, Utah.

I was an early associate of Mrs. Wood, who wanted to determine why some people could read faster than others. More specifically, she wanted to define learning theories that could account for how individuals were able to read more than 400 words per minute.

One of her earliest examples was Dr. Lowell Lees, a friend and teacher at the University of Utah. Her tests showed that he could read more than 6,000 words per minute with excellent comprehension.

Eventually, Mrs. Wood identified more than 100 individuals who could read more than 1,500 words per minute.

Using that rate as a minimum, she studied these people to determine what they were doing, how they were doing it, and how they had learned to do it. In these studies, she soon found out what they were doing, but not yet how they had learned to do it.

Her next step was to try to teach herself to read fast.

She used to practice trying to read faster during summers while she and her husband were at their cabin up in one of the canyons outside of Salt Lake City.

Once, while practicing in the book Green Mansions, she became so angry at her inability to read fast that she threw the book across a little creek. After picking the book up and dusting the dirt off its pages, she suddenly realized that the movement of her hand was causing her to see and read more than one word at a time.

Thus, she discovered the use of the hand as a pacer for her reading.

And the rest, as is often repeated, is history.

Mrs. Wood called her system "Reading Dynamics," using hand motions as its primary technique to guide readers rapidly down pages of text. Her system stressed overall improvements in reading efficiency, including comprehension, word retention and dramatically increased reading speeds.

She opened the first Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics Institute in Washington, D.C. in 1959, followed soon after by similar learning centers around the country.

Evelyn Wood invited me to her home in Tucson shortly before her death in 1995. During the meeting, I discussed and demonstrated my idea for a high-tech reading program to encourage speed reading. She liked the program so much that she told me: "Had I a computer in the '60s, this is the program I would have developed."