The Legacy of Stanford Taylor

A family remade how reading was understood

Born in Austin, Texas, in 1927, Stan grew up inside a family already remaking how reading was understood. His father, Earl A. Taylor, and his uncles James and Carl had built the first devices to record and train a reader’s eye movements—the Ophthalmograph and the Metronoscope—in the 1930s.

As a young man he worked at his father’s side in reading laboratories across the country—testing students, refining the machines, and learning the science by building it. Trained as an artist at Pratt Institute, he brought a designer’s eye and a restless inventiveness to the family’s work.

Stan based his own pioneering work on the results of his research: that reading is best developed as a multisensory experience, engaging eye, ear, and hand together. On that foundation he extended the family’s science. In 1960 he published the first large-scale norms for silent reading, built on a recording camera of his own design; the underlying study, with thirty-nine colleges and universities taking part, remains the most extensive eye-movement reading research conducted in the United States. He founded Educational Developmental Laboratories—later acquired by McGraw-Hill—whose Controlled Reader and tachistoscopes reached classrooms nationwide, and he went on to build the systems behind the original Reading Plus and the Visagraph, the first instrument to measure a reader’s efficiency automatically, by computer.

“The eye can be systematically trained to perceive numbers, letters, and words accurately and lastingly. It can be developed into a more efficient avenue to remembering, a more accurate discriminator for making judgments, and a better tool for acquiring meaningful material.”

Stanford E. Taylor

His contributions to the body of knowledge were extensive: across half a century Stan authored more than 300 books, tests, and research reports, insisting always that instruction follow the evidence rather than the fashion. Those achievements let him forge important collaborations between vision and literacy experts—partnerships that together revealed the essential, often overlooked role the eyes play in the reading process.

What Stan could measure, he set out to improve. Today’s technology makes far more of his vision achievable than his own instruments ever could—and the Stanford Taylor Foundation carries that work forward through research, data-informed instruction, and continued innovation.