Alice Marie Felt (1883–1936) was the daughter of Dorr and the architect of the human interface. She proved that a machine needs a human trained to match its speed to be truly powerful. While her father laboured over the physical machine, Alice focused on the “Interaction”.
Taking the lead of the company’s nascent training department in the early 1910s, she transformed informal workshops into a global network of elite professional schools. She codified the curriculum for “touch addition”, a rigorous method that allowed operators to process columns of figures with a virtuoso’s speed without ever glancing down at the keys.