Where did the sentence ‘now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’ originate?

February 16, 2023

Where did the sentence ‘now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party’ originate?

Was it:

Karl Marx, Revolutionary
Groucho Marx, Wit and comedian
Charles E Weller, Author of a history of the typewriter?

The answer is Charles E Weller, author of a successful book about the early history of the typewriter.
He came up with a training exercise for young typewriters. (Yes, in the early 1900s, the users of typewriters were known as typewriters. Weller came up with the sentence as a practice drill).

One good idea leads to another

Later, the idea was modified to read:

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

This works out as the required seventy characters (counting the fifteen spaces between words and the full stop to give a classical full line of type.

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Incidentally, another even more famous typing exercise is

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

You may already know, or worked it out for the first time. ‘The exercise ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ is an example of a pangram, a sentence containing all the letters of the alphabet.

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