In 1870, a twenty-year-old compositor at The New York Times named George Arensberg — nicknamed “The Boy” — set 2,064 ems of solid minion type in a single hour, the four-minute mile of hand typesetting. His peers dubbed him “the Velocipede,” and his record launched a decade-long craze: typesetting races that drew crowds in the thousands, offered prize purses up to $1,000 (half a year’s wages for a typical compositor), and turned “Swifts” like William C. Barnes (who set type blindfolded with his cases reversed) into minor celebrities. By the 1880s, the races had moved from printshop backrooms to dime museums alongside vaudeville and circuses. The 1887 booklet Fast Typesetting codified official rules and promised silver composing-stick trophies to future champions. But the most dramatic contest happened in 1886 at Boston’s Austin & Stone’s Dime Museum, where Miss L. J. Kenney set a women’s record of 24,950 ems — beating every man who had competed the day before. Officials refused to acknowledge her result, claiming “much latitude was allowed the ladies” without a shred of evidence, but the genie was out of the bottle: women compositors, paid 25–50% less than men and largely excluded from unionized newspaper composing rooms, had proven themselves on the same stage. As Alex Wright recounts in this adaptation from his forthcoming book Empire of Ink, the velocipede’s twilight came with Linotype’s arrival in the 1880s, but not before the Swifts had their moment in the spotlight — and used it to challenge the boys’ club that ran America’s newspapers.