WHAT’S THE STORY?
THERE are a few inventions which have stood the test of time virtually unchanged. Motor cars tend to have four wheels and a driving wheel, the light bulb is still basically a heated filament inside a glass sealed vacuum, and we nearly all use a QWERTY keyboard.

That keyboard came from the man who is credited with inventing the first commercial typewriter, Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. He and his partners Samuel W Soule and Carlos Glidden together produced the prototype and 150 years ago today on June 23, 1868, Sholes, Soule and Glidden received the patent for their invention, the Type Writing Machine.

It is US Patent 79265, and if you view it online you’ll see that it looks more like a piano than a typewriter, and indeed it was mostly made of wood and had ebony and ivory keys like a piano/

Sholes very much saw it as a work in progress and it was not until the following year with the help of a brilliant mechanical engineer Matthias Schwalbach that they produced and sold the first commercial typewriter. which had four banks of keys.

WHO WAS HE?
SHOLES was a printer who hailed from Mooresburg in Pennsylvania but he went west and made the new territory of Wisconsin his home, living in Green Bay where he worked for his elder brothers who were publishers.

Sholes then moved to Kenosha and Milwaukee. In the former town he became editor of the local newspaper in Kenosha while only 25, and he then entered politics, eventually serving three brief terms on the Wisconsin Senate and State Assembly.

He campaigned for the abolition of slavery and also the abolition of the death penalty after witnessing the botched hanging of a wife-murderer, John McCaffary, in 1851. Wisconsin has not had the death penalty since and is the only State in the Union to have executed just one person, the aforesaid McCaffary.

As a development of his printing trade, Sholes began to look at making more functional machines to help printers. His first major patent was for a page numbering machine, but it is for his work on typewriters –developed from that original numbering machine – that Sholes is most remembered.

He shared that 1868 patent with Glidden and Soule. It states: “Be it known that we, C. LATHAM SHOLES, CARLOS GLIDDEN, and SAMUEL W. SOULE, of the city of Milwaukee, and county of Milwaukee, and State of Wisconsin have invented new and useful Improvements in Type-writing Machines; and We do hereby declare that the following is a full, clear, and exact description of the invention, which will enable those skilled in the art to make and use the same.”

A plaque in Milwaukee marks the spot where they worked, stating: “At 318 State Street, 300 feet northeast of here, C Latham Sholes perfected the first practical typewriter in 1869. Here he worked with Carlos Glidden, Samuel W Soulé and Matthias Schwalbach in the machine shop of CF Kleinsteuber.”

Sholes later became known as the Father of the Typewriter, because it was his ingenuity that mostly devised the typewriter and because in the years after the trio gained the patent, Sholes developed the Qwerty keyboard.

WHY QWERTY?
WRITING machines such as the Pterotyope developed by American lawyer and editor John Pratt when he moved to London after the American Civil War had their keys positioned differently, but used the basic alphabet.

Sholes had a problem with the typewriter they were building in a local machine shop.

The problem was that the ABCD keyboard meant that the keys kept jamming whenever someone tried to work them fast, so Sholes, with the help of an educator Amos Dinsmore, analysed letter pairings and patented the Qwerty keyboard that made typewriting quicker because it slowed down typists’ work and caused fewer jams.

Sholes later sold his patents to the Remington company for $12,000, and he never got rich or famous, dying in relative obscurity in 1890. His genius was only recognised long after his death.