Who is Christopher Latham Sholes?

To most, Milwaukee will always be known as the city of festivals.  But for a select few, Milwaukee is known as the birthplace of the typewriter.

Christopher Latham Sholes was born on February 14, 1819, near Mooresburg, Pennsylvania.  He died on February 17, 1890, in Milwaukee.  Sholes is credited as the U.S. inventor who developed the typewriter.

After completing his schooling, Sholes was apprenticed as a printer and four years later became editor of the Wisconsin Enquirer, in Madison.  After a year, he moved to Kenosha to run the newspaper there and soon entered politics, serving in the state legislature.  In 1860, he became editor of the Milwaukee News and later of the Milwaukee Sentinel.  He later gave up that position to accept appointment from President Lincoln as collector of the port of Milwaukee.

His new, less demanding job gave Christopher Latham Sholes the time he needed to exercise his inventive genius.  In 1864, he and a friend, Samuel W. Soule', were granted a patent for a page numbering machine.  A fellow inventor-mechanic, Carlos Glidden, suggested to Sholes that he might rework his device into a letter printing machine and referred him to a published account of a writing machine devised by John Pratt of London.  Sholes was so intrigued by the idea that he spent the remainder of his life on the project.

Along with Glidden and Soule', Sholes was granted a patent for the typewriter on June 23, 1868.  Later improvements gained him two more patents; but due to difficulty in raising money for development, he sold his patent rights.  In 1873, Sholes sold the rights for $12,000 to the Remington Arms Company, a firm well equipped with machinery and skill to carry out the development work that resulted in the machine being marketed as the Remington Typewriter.

The first practical typewriter marketed by the Remington Arms company in 1873, proved to have some drawbacks.  The action of the type bars in the early typewriters were very sluggish and tended to jam frequently.  To fix this problem, Sholes obtained a list of the most common letters used in English, and rearranged his keyboard from an alphabetic arrangement to one in which the most common pairs of letters were spread fairly far apart on the keyboard.  Because typists at that time used the "hunt and peck" method, Sholes' arrangement increased the time it took for the typists to hit the keys for common two letter combinations enough to ensure that each type bar had enough time to fall back into place before the next one came up.  Sholes had never imagined that typing would ever be faster than handwriting, which is usually 20 words per minute (WPM) or less.  This new arrangement was named the Sholes QWERTY keyboard and is still used today.

The "hunt- and- peck" method ruled until 1888, when a new era was born called the touch -typing technique.  In 1888, a law clerk named Frank E. McGurrin won a highly publicized typing contest with his self-taught touch-typing technique.  Touch-typing means that you type by touch using all 10 fingers without looking at the keyboard.

Here are a few more interesting facts:  The Sholes keyboard is called the QWERTY keyboard because of the ordering of the first six keys in the third row.  On the original Sholes keyboard, there was no key for the number '1', because the inventors decided that the users could get by with the letter 'l'.  There was no shift key, the first typewriters could only type upper case letters.  The first shift key typewriter didn't appear on the market until 1878.

What would Sholes think about the fact that his invention, the typewriter,  has made possible the computer Age and the Information revolution of today.   Try picturing a personal computer without Sholes' typewriter keyboard.