Catherine (Cook) Sholes, with an older brother named Charles and a younger sister named Harriet. Their mother died the same year that Harriett was born, which suggests that she either died in childbirth or not long afterward. She’s buried in Danville’s Old Presbyterian Church Cem- etery. This had to have been particularly hard on Orrin, whose first wife Cynthia had also died in childbirth after only a year of marriage, and the baby had also died. As a young man, C. L. moved to Danville, where he ap- prenticed to a printer; there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot written about his youth beyond this fact. Following his apprenticeship, the entire family moved to Wisconsin, first to Milwaukee and later to what became the com- munity of Kenosha. Older brother Charles served in the Wisconsin legislature for a time and eventually became the mayor of Kenosha. Younger sister Harriett remained at home with their father, until she died in her twenties of unrecorded causes. C. L., meanwhile, got married in 1841 to Mary Jane McKinney of Green Bay, with whom he had ten children. C. L. founded his own newspaper, the Kenosha Telegraph, and also became an active politician - with multiple par- ties! He was a Wisconsin state senator as a Democrat, then served in the state assembly as a Free Soiler (a short- lived party which opposed slavery and eventually merged with the Republicans), and then again as a state senator, this time as a Republican. One of the most noteworthy points of his time in office was that, during his Republican term, the state senate was rocked by a railroad corruption scheme, and C. L. was one of the very few legislators who refused to accept a bribe. However, his political career was not as memorable to us as his printing career. Now, despite what the markers claim, he was technically not the inventor of the type- writer; various forms of the typewriter were created as early as 1714. No, C. L.’s contribution was a little bit dif- ferent, and in fact, he didn’t originally set out to create a typewriter at all. Rather, with a fellow printer by the name of Samuel Soule, he set out to create a machine that would handle the onerous task of printing numbers on things like tickets, and their numbering machine was patented in 1866. They shared their creation with a fellow amateur inventor, Car- los Glidden, who wondered if it couldn’t also be made to print letters and therefore words. This was probably in C. L.’s mind when he read a piece in the magazine Scientif- ic American, which detailed John Pratt’s invention called the “Pterotype.” He read the article and decided that this design was too complicated for the average user, so he set out to make a better one. Partnering with his friends Samuel and Carlos (the latter most- ly providing financial support), C. L. crafted a keyboard pat- terned after a piano, with black and white keys laid out in two rows. The keys were fashioned from ebony and ivory, set in a wooden frame, and the design was patented in 1868. By this time, inked ribbons had been invented by someone else, which made the machine practical for use. Because there was a lot
TOP: C.L. Sholes in his later years, shown with a typewriter, of course! BOTTOM: A letter of recommendation from Sholes to E.M. Joslin in support of Joslin’s application to become a Congressional Librarian. Note he signs it as “C.L. Sholes”
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