Christopher Latham Sholes

Christopher Latham Sholes

Biography

Christopher Latham Sholes was an American inventor that was coined as being the "Father of the Typewriter". Although he didn't invent it, he developed the first practical typewriter for use commercially. However, he did invent the Qwerty Keyboard; the standard arrangement of letters located on most modern keyboards today. Historically, he is regarded as a significant contributor to the development of engineering and technology.

Sholes was born February 14th, 1819, near Mooresburg Pennsylvania. On his mother's side, his bloodline can be traced back to John and Priscilla Alden, famous Pilgrims of their time. His paternal grandfather had commanded a gunboat during the Revolutionary War; his father Orrin served in the War of 1812 and was rewarded for his service with a bed of land in Pennsylvania. In 1823, when Sholes was four, Orrin moved his family to Danville Pennsylvania to apprentice his four sons into becoming printers.

After completing his schooling to become a printers apprentice in 1833, in 1837 he moved to the new territory of Wisconsin to work for his elder brothers newspaper publication in Green Bay. After working as an apprentice, a few years later at the age of 21 he moved to Southport, Wisconsin and founded the Southport Telegraph, a weekly newspaper. Southport was a new town on Lake Michigan shoreline south of Madison where Sholes served as the owner and publisher of the Telegraph. Settling into Southport, he married Mary Jane MeKinney in 1940, living with his family in the town until 1857.

In addition to publishing, Sholes also played a key role in early Wisconsin politics. Still young, he helped to organize the free Soil and Republican parties in Wisconsin and served several terms in the state senate and assembly. However, his most memorable legislative accomplishment may have been leading the successful campaign to outlaw the death penalty in Wisconsin in 1853.

However, despite being a publisher and an politician, Sholes true passion had always been in being an inventor. Sholes throughout his life had already shown incredible feats of intuition, leading him to take another position as the editor for the Wisconsin Enquirer in Madison, which afterwards in 1860 he choose to instead take another editor position in the Milwaukee News. However, he again dropped this position in favor of becoming a collector for the port of Milwaukee, an appointment given to him by Abraham Lincoln.

With a comfortable, less demanding position, Sholes was given the opportunity in his free time to tinker with publication machinery. In 1867, while perfecting a page numbering device in Charles F. Kleinsteuber's machine shop in Milwaukeee, Sholes met Carlos Glidden who encouraged him to develop a mechanical writing machine. A few months later, an article titled the "Type Writing Machine" in Scientific American inspired Sholes to pursue this suggestion. With he aid of machinists Matthias Schwalbach and inventor Samuel Soule, they aimed to produce a functioning model by the end of the year.

Seeing to improve earlier typewriters, the key to Sholes's success was the superior mechanical design of his model. Compared to its predecessors, many early model typewriters that were developed displayed jamming issues. To fix this problem, Sholes obtained a list of the most common letters used in the English language, and rearranged the keyboard from an alphabetic arrangement to one in which the most common pairs of letters were spread fairly apart. Thus, Sholes's arrangement increased the time it took for the typists to hit the keys for common two-letter combinations enough to ensure that each bar had time to fall back sufficiently far to be out of the way before the next one came.

Applying this concept to its development, the team went to work in producing the typewriter. Requiring funds, they were able to successfully receive funding from James Densmore, an oil man who had heard about their attempts. In all, sholes and Glidden (Soule dropped out after failing in the first attempts) produced more than 30 working models before finally producing a product that the Remington and Son arms factory could put into production. Eventually, the first typewriter model went into production in the year 1874.

However, the 1874 model that was produced by Shole and his team went mostly unnoticed. in 1878 Remington produced a second version, replacing the Shole model; but sales only reached a low 5,000 machines by 1886. Sadly, Sholes died after a long battle with tuberculous in 1890, just before he could see the substantial success of his machine. And despite the unquestionable impact his machine had on writing and communication, Sholes suffered from depression as he perceived his product to be a failure.

While he was unable to witness it, only ten years later in 1900 up to 100,000 models were being sold a year, proving it to be a massive success. Thus the Shole typewriter, as well as the Qwerty keyboard, went on to usher a new age of publication and journalism. For written pieces didn't necessarily have to be produced via pen; they could now be created with a method that's faster and more reliable. And even if the typewriter were to become outdated in the 20th century, the Qwerty keyboard went on to serve as the bases for all forms of typing to come.