of competition for making similar devices, they embarked on a letter-writing campaign (writing the letters on their type- writer, of course) and succeeded in garnering the interest of James Densmore, a fellow inventor in Meadville, Pennsylva- nia. James offered to buy an equal share of the patent, sight unseen, in return for covering all their expenses to date, which the trio eagerly accepted. When he did finally get to see the thing, however, he didn’t like it and wanted the makers to im- prove it. Samuel and Carlos decided to bail at that point, so C. L. and James went in on it together. The partners enlisted the help of stenographer James Cle- phane in Washington, D.C., who subjected the typewriter to such rigorous testing that he literally destroyed every model they sent him. Using his unwhitewashed recommendations, they set to work improving their design, and in 1873 they brought it to the Remington corporation in New York. Rem- ington bought the patent from them and became the first commercial manufacturer of typewriters. As an aside, my own first typewriter, a Christmas gift from my grandfather when I was nine years old, was a Remington. It was blue and I frequently caught my fingers between the keys, but I loved it all the same. So C. L. did not invent the typewriter, but he’s remembered as “the father of the typewriter” because of his work on it. Also, while he didn’t invent the machine itself, he did invent the name - typewriter being a short form of ‘type writing ma- chine’ - so when people call him “inventor of the typewriter,” they’re factually correct... from a certain point of view. Furthermore, his story doesn’t end here. He went back to Wis- consin and continued tinkering with his design. In particular, he and James had been concerned about keystroke recov- ery; because the keys were returned to their resting position by weights rather than springs, the keys sometimes got stuck when common letter combinations were typed. The idea was to split up the most frequently used combos in order to pre- vent this. If you’re a frequent typist, you can probably guess where I’m going with this. That’s right - our friend C. L. is the one respon- sible for the insane-looking keyboard layout still in use today, generally known as the QWERTY keyboard. It’s all his fault. QWERTY actually does make sense, as it was explained to me when I was taught how to type properly in the sixth grade (after two years of hunting and pecking with two fingers); the most frequently used letters are the most easily accessible to the dominant fingers. Like many fledgling typists, I went from thinking I would never get the hang of this nonsensical layout to wondering how I ever managed without it, and as someone who types literally every day of her life, I can’t begin to guess how much time this has saved me. This blog would not be possible without such a method of typing quickly. So yes, it’s all his fault, but it’s also all to his credit. He’s also the one who came up with the idea of the shift key, to enable the use of both uppercase and lowercase letters. In newspaper printing, the letter blocks were stored in cases,
This slightly different marker to Christopher Sholes stands in Mooresburg at the intersection of Liberty Valley Road (PA 642) and Mooresburg Road, at the Mooresburg One-Room Schoolhouse Museum.
This drawing depicts the original Sholes, Glidden & Soule machine that was patented on June 23, 1868. Note the piano-like keys.
To read more about the invention of the typewriter, check out Richard N. Current’s “The Original Typewriter Enterprise, 1867-1873” which is available digitally here: https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/wmh/id/17858
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