Christopher Latham Sholes

• Born: February 14, 1819
• Birthplace: near Mooresburg, Pennsylvania
• Died: February 17, 1890
• Place of death: Milwaukee, Wisconsin

American newspaper editor and mechanical engineer

Sholes is the inventor of the first commercially viable typewriter and the developer of the QWERTY keyboard, the system that is still in use today on word processors and computers.

Primary fields: Mechanical engineering; printing

Primary inventions: QWERTY keyboard; practical typewriter

Early Life

Christopher Latham Sholes was born on February 14, 1819, in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania. As a teenager, he moved to Danville, where he apprenticed to a printer. He joined his brothers Henry and Charles in Green Bay, Wisconsin, when he was eighteen. There his experience as a printer landed him the position of editor of the Wisconsin Enquirer, where he worked for about a year. He relocated again, this time to Kenosha, where in 1845 he became the publisher and editor of the Southport Telegraph. He continued to publish the newspaper for seventeen years.

Sholes decided to enter politics, and he was elected to the Wisconsin senate for two terms—first from 1848 to 1849 and then from 1856 to 1857. In the years between these terms, he served in the Wisconsin State Assembly, from 1852 to 1853. In 1860, he became the editor of the Milwaukee News, but he soon left the newspaper to become editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel. During the Civil War years, Sholes was the Milwaukee postmaster until he was appointed by President Abraham Lincoln to be the Milwaukee port collector. As port collector, he had some free time to pursue his other interests, one of which was developing mechanical typing machines.

Life’s Work

In 1864, Sholes and fellow inventor Carlos Glidden collaborated on developing a machine that could sequentially number pages in book folios. They based this new design on a machine that Sholes and another inventor, Samuel Soulé, had built to sequentially number railroad tickets. One day, Glidden read an article in Scientific American that described the Pterotype, a writing machine built by John Pratt in London, and showed it to Sholes. The two men resolved to attempt to rework their numbering machine to make a writing machine.

Sholes, Soulé, and Glidden began work on their writing machine in 1867 in a local machine shop owned by C. F. Kleinsteuber. Their first prototype used a bar attached to a telegraph key to move the type up when the key was pressed down. They filed for a patent for this design on October 11, 1857. Sholes parted ways with Glidden and Soulé after filing the patent. Needing financial support for his enterprise, Sholes entered into a partnership with James Densmore, who, for 25 percent of the patent rights, agreed to pay off Sholes’s debts and to provide future financing. Densmore saw the commercial potential of the writing machine and hoped to profit from his partnership with Sholes.

Densmore filed a patent application on May 1, 1868, for an improved model of the writing machine that used a modified piano keyboard to move the type bars. Sholes continued working on improvements to the machine and by 1872 had constructed more than twenty-five prototypes. In 1870, Densmore made his first attempt to sell Sholes’s writing machine. He offered it exclusively to the Automatic Telegraph Company for $50,000. Thomas Alva Edison told the company that he could make a better machine for less money, so the company declined Densmore’s offer. Edison was never able to make good on his offer.

Densmore then partnered with George Washington Newton Yost, an entrepreneur who sold petroleum and invented farm machinery. Together they sold the writing machine to E. Remington and Sons in March, 1873, for $12,000. Since the end of the Civil War and hence a decreased demand for their firearms, Remington had begun manufacturing farm implements and sewing machines and was interested in other inventions that it could profitably manufacture. The first typewriter that Remington produced, dubbed the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, had problems with jamming. The bars that held the type moved slowly enough that if the typist typed too quickly, they would jam up against each other. The first typists used the “hunt and peck” method of typing, so Sholes thought that if the most commonly typed pairs of letters were positioned far apart from each other, typists would take longer to move their index fingers the distance from one letter key to the next and therefore have less of a chance of typing too rapidly and jamming the bars. (Sholes at first thought that no one would ever type faster than about twenty words per minute, the equivalent of writing by hand.) Sholes’s first keyboard had the keys arranged alphabetically, based on the way newspaper printers’ letters were arranged. The new arrangement earned the name “QWERTY,” for the first six letters on the top row of the keyboard. Only the middle row kept a semblance of the original alphabetical arrangement minus the vowels—D F G H J K L. Sholes’s QWERTY system is still used today.

Sholes is credited with coining the name “typewriter” for his writing machine. Some researchers have suggested that part of Sholes’s rationale for selecting the letters for the top line of his QWERTY keyboard was that the line then included all the letters in the word “typewriter.” Salesmen demonstrating the new writing machine could show how they could type “typewriter” just using the top line of the keyboard.

The first Remington typewriters typed only capital letters. In 1878, Sholes added a shift key to his design and had both a capital and lowercase letter on each type head. His new keyboard did not have a key for the number 1, as Sholes thought that typing the small letter L, l, would suffice.

The mass production of the Remington typewriters was assigned to the treasurer of the Remington sewing machine department, H. H. Benedict. At first, the typewriter was morphed with sewing machine technology; it was mounted on a sewing machine base complete with a treadle that, when moved, returned the typewriter’s carriage. The first typewriters were also festooned with the same decorative flowers that were painted on the sewing machines. It may be that the feminizing of the appearance of the first commercially produced typewriters led to the association between women and the career of typing.

Sholes spent his retirement years in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He died on February 17, 1890, and is buried in Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee.

Impact

The typewriter has proven to be an invaluable tool since its invention and commercial production. It increased business productivity, gave writers a more rapid method for writing books and manuscripts, provided students with a means to neatly write their school papers, and gave newspaper reporters an implement for writing their articles. Perhaps the area in which it had the greatest impact was women’s employment. Before the typewriter’s development and subsequent demand for typists, women had few options for employment. Sholes commented several times that his invention had proved to be a blessing for women, as it enabled them to earn a decent living. Today, word processors and computers have largely replaced the typewriter, but all major computer manufacturers use Sholes’s QWERTY keyboard.

Bibliography

Adler, Michael H. Antique Typewriters: From Creed to QWERTY. Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 1997. Wonderful illustrations of the early typewriters and a detailed history of the invention and development of the machine.

Cassingham, Randy C. Dvorak Keyboard: The Ergonomically Designed Keyboard, Now an American Standard. Jamaica Plain, Mass.: Freelance Press, 1986. The title says it all: a book touting the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard and instructions for its use.

Linoff, Victor M. The Typewriter: An Illustrated History. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2000. A reprint of the October, 1923, edition of Typewriter Topics, this book contains many illustrations of early typewriters, including Sholes and Remington typewriters.

Russo, Thomas A. Mechanical Typewriters: Their History, Value, and Legacy. Atglen, Pa.: Schiffer, 2002. The historical development of the typewriter, including information on patents, histories of the manufacturers, and brief biographies.

Wershler-Henry, Darren. The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. A history of the development of the typewriter, including Sholes’s work, and the evolution of and attempts to change the QWERTY keyboard configuration.