More than a score of attempts, both in this country and abroad, were made to perfect a typewriter after the birth of the idea in the mind of Henry Mill, an English engineer, who obtained a patent from Queen Ann of England, January 1, 1714, but none was successful.
It remained for an humble country boy, a printer, by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes, who was born in the little village of Mooresburg, Montour County, Pennsylvania, February 14, 1819, to perfect a model in the winter of 1866–67, which, after later improvements, was the basis for the typewriting machines which are now so much a part of commercial life throughout the world.
The patent granted to Henry Mill by Queen Ann never availed the imaginative engineer anything, because he lacked the essential ability to perfect a model which might be manufactured on a commercial basis. It is true, nevertheless, that he had the idea for a “writing machine for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after the other,” but this was not sufficient to be practical in any sense of the term.
The same difficulty that beset Mill prevented others from attaining success, and it was a century and a half before the actual birth of a commercial typewriter.
This interesting event was enacted in a small machine shop in the outskirts of Milwaukee. An interesting history was published recently by the Herkimer County (New York) Historical Society in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the manufacture of the first typewriter for commercial use. According to this story the principals were Carlos Gliden, the son of a successful iron monger of Ohio, who was engaged in developing a mechanical plow; Samuel W. Soule and Christopher Latham Sholes, both printers, who were engaged in developing a machine for numbering serially the pages of blank books, etc.
Sholes was the central figure in the association subsequently formed among the three. Sholes began his active life as an apprentice in the office of the Danville, Pa., Intelligencer.
The Intelligencer was then the oldest paper in Montour County, founded in 1828 by Valentine Best. At the time of Sholes’ apprenticeship the newspaper was a leading Democratic organ. The Intelligencer office was an excellent school for a boy when Christopher Sholes became the “devil” and began the career which was to stamp him as one of the great inventors of the country.
Thomas Chalfant purchased the property July 15, 1861. He was a prominent Democratic politician, serving as member of the Legislature and as State Senator. He was a Civil War veteran and many years postmaster at Danville. Through all his various offices Chalfant devoted much time to his newspaper.
Sholes was diligent and progressed in his chosen profession, becoming in turn, editor of several newspapers and ultimately an owner. In 1866 he was collector of the port of Milwaukee and had held other public offices, including State Senator and Assemblyman.