Christopher Latham Sholes Changed Writing Forever, But Barely Profited From It

Look

down at the keyboard in front of you. The arrangement of those letters, the strange, unalphabetical run of Q, W, E, R, T and Y, was settled more than 150 years ago by a newspaperman in Milwaukee. His name was Christopher Latham Sholes, and the machine he built reshaped how the modern world wrote, worked and did business. Yet for all of that, he walked away from his own invention for a sum that would barely register today, and died a man of modest means while others grew rich on his idea.Also Read: Bina Das and Hassan Suhrawardy: The Revolutionary and The Vice-Chancellor On Two Sides Of One Bullet

Who Was Christopher Latham Sholes?

Born in 1819 near Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, Sholes was apprenticed to a printer as a teenager before moving to Wisconsin, where he spent his working life as a printer, newspaper editor and journalist. He was a public man too, serving in the state legislature, helping to found the Republican Party in Wisconsin, and eventually taking up the post of customs collector at the port of Milwaukee. He was, in other words, a man of words and ink long before he became a man of machines. That printer's instinct would matter because his first step towards the typewriter was not a writing machine at all.

How Did A Page-Numbering Machine Become The Typewriter?

In 1866, working in a Milwaukee machine shop, Sholes built a device to print page numbers in books and serial numbers on tickets. A fellow tinkerer suggested it might be made to print letters as well as numbers. With two collaborators, the amateur mechanic Carlos Glidden and the printer Samuel Soule, Sholes set about building a machine that could write. In October 1867 they filed for a patent, and on 23 June 1868 it was granted. Sholes gave his creation the name that stuck: the typewriter.

Why Are The Keys Arranged In That Strange Order?

The early machines carried a stubborn flaw. When a typist struck keys in quick succession, the metal typebars bearing the letters would clash and jam. Sholes worked on the problem by separating the most commonly paired letters across the keyboard, so the bars were less likely to collide. The result was the QWERTY layout, an arrangement built to manage the limits of nineteenth-century machinery, and one that has long outlived the very problem it was designed to solve. More than a century and a half later, you are still typing on it.

Why Did He Sell His Invention?

Sholes was an inventor, not a businessman, and he struggled to raise the money to develop the machine. The man who believed in it was James Densmore, a relentless backer who poured in funds and drove the project on. In 1873 Densmore carried a Sholes machine, wrapped in newsprint, to the Remington Arms Company in New York, a gun maker looking to diversify after the Civil War. Remington agreed to manufacture it, and at that point Sholes sold his remaining rights in the typewriter for 12,000 dollars. The Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer reached the market in 1874, and the machine that would conquer the world's offices was on its way, with its inventor sharing little in the spoils.

Did He Regret Letting It Go?

Here, the story refuses to settle into a simple tale of a man cheated by history. Sholes never stopped tinkering with the machine. In 1878, he added the shift key, giving the typewriter both capital and lowercase letters, and he worked on touch typing and a portable model even as his health failed. He seems to have measured the worth of his invention not by the fortune he had missed, but by what it did for others. Speaking to his daughter-in-law not long before his death, he was told that he had done something great for the world. He answered that he did not know about the world, but that he had done something for the women who had always had to work so hard, and that he believed it would help them earn a living more easily.

The thought worth carrying away is this. Sholes died in 1890, a man of modest means, while the typewriter he built went on to put millions to work, open the office door to women, and change the rhythm of written communication for a century. It would be easy to file him among the inventors robbed by their own creations. But he understood his legacy more clearly than that. The measure of what he made was never the 12,000 dollars he took for it. It was the keyboard beneath your fingers right now, and the countless people, the working women of his own century above all, whose lives his quiet machine transformed.