The Key to Sholes’ Typewriter

Why Christopher LathamSholes and his typewriter aren't as well known as Alexander Graham Bell and thetelephone and Johannes Gutenberg and the printing press is curious. Whereasstories of the latter can be found in history books, Sholes and his majorcontribution to humankind are notably absent. Like many inventions, pinpointingthe actual inception of the typewriter is tough because the idea came intobeing gradually, charged with false starts, redundancies and parallel momentsof innovation as similar ideas occurred to inventors at various times and invarious places. As a result, its origin is inevitably shrouded in myth andinaccuracies of all sorts.

Though the name may beobscure to most, Christopher Latham Sholes, at various times a newspaperman,politician, customs collector and an abolitionist, is generally credited withthe invention of the first commercially successful typewriter. According toDarren Wershler-Henry, author of The IronWhim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, by the time Sholes becameinterested in the project of creating a writing machine, the idea had beenaround for more than 150 years, and Sholes' concept owed much to itsprecursors.

In 1867, Sholes andfrequent collaborator Carlos Glidden began work on the typewriter in C.F.Kleinsteuber's machine shop, a nexus for local inventors, in downtownMilwaukee. The first model the group produced consisted of a single type barconnected to a telegraph key. When the key was pressed, the type bar swung upto hit a carbon-paper sandwich supported by a thin glass disk. By fall, theyhad a crude prototype retrofitted from a kitchen table. Sholes, Glidden andanother partner, Samuel W. Soulé, filed a patent application on Oct. 11, 1867for the telegraph-key prototype.

The early stages ofdevelopment strained the financial resources of the men and they took on afinancial investor named James Densmore in March 1868. The inventors improvedtheir original concept, and developed between 25-30 separate prototypes,including one that, instead of having the keys in alphabetical order,positioned frequently used combinations of keys far apart so the levers in thetype basket wouldn't jam. Sholes called on Milwaukee newspapermen from his daysas editor of the Sentinel and the MilwaukeeNews to test each new model as it was finished, asking them topoint out its defects and make suggestions. By 1872 the inventors had developeda model that incorporated QWERTYthose are the first six letters at the upperleft-hand side of the keyboardwhich became the prototype of all modernstandard typewriters, although it lacked a shift and a front stroke.

Sholes eventually soldhis interest in the original machine to Densmore and another investor namedGeorge Washington Newton Yöst, who finally secured the sale of the typewriterin March 1873 to E. Remington & Sons (then famous as a manufacturer of gunsand sewing machines) to commercialize the machine as the Sholes and Gliddentypewriter. By 1876, it had been renamed the No. I Remington. According toArthur Foulke, author of Mr. Typewriter,Christopher Sholes later disowned the machine and refused to use it, or evenrecommend it, but his indelible mark on the world was already written.