(re-post)
I believe I could manage maybe thirty to forty words per minute on the portable Underwood I got for my twelfth birthday more than fifty years ago. (I must admit that if I factored in the errors and time taken to correct them it was more like ten words per minute.)
I have no idea what the speed would be on this lovely old Remington machine. Possibly a negative number. Hah!
I could likely ask Google via Mac and Mac would, like it is now, swiftly type out the letters with a sort of tiptiptiptip sound and Google would silently answer (in nano time) my query as to how many words per minute typists in the past could produce on various machines.
What a contrast with now. Unbelievable what we went through, but, of course, we had no comparison.
I would not trade Mac for one of the past. But I do have two manual machines as well as this one – just in case the power fails. Why this would be necessary has not really been thought through. I assume pencils would suffice.