The scene—three men, all middle aged, thoughtful and studious, each one hard at work on a pet invention of his own, without a thought in the mind of any one of them of the great achievement which was destined to come out of this chance association.
Thus was the stage set for the invention of the first practical typewriter, though nearly seven years were yet to elapse before its actual production began in the little town of Ilion, New York.
One of these three men, Carlos Glidden, the son of a successful ironmonger of Ohio, was engaged in developing a mechanical “spader” to take the place of a plow.
The other two, Samuel W. Soulé and Christopher Latham Sholes, both printers by trade, were engaged in developing a machine for numbering serially the pages of blank books and the like.
Of these men, the central figure in the association subsequently formed was Christopher Latham Sholes, a name which must always occupy the place of highest honor in any history of the writing machine.
Sholes was born in Columbia County, Penn., on February 14, 1819. He came of the oldest New England stock and his ancestors had served with distinction in the War of the Revolution. His grandfather on the maternal side was a lineal descendant of John and Priscilla Alden, so the spirit of the pioneer was a part of his inheritance. It is also of deep significance that Sholes was a printer and publisher by trade, the most closely allied mechanical arts to typewriting that the world then knew. As a publisher, Sholes knew, from the necessities of his own occupation, the vital help that a writing machine would offer. And it certainly accords with the fitness of things that, after the lapse of four centuries, the art of Gutenberg should have furnished, in one of its disciples, the inventor of the typewriter.
At the age of fourteen young Sholes was apprenticed to the editor of the Intelligencer of Danville, Pa., to learn the printing trade, but four years later he joined his brother, Charles C. Sholes, well known in the early politics of Wisconsin, then living in Green Bay. A frail constitution, with a tendency to consumption, of which disease he finally died, seems to have influenced his early removal to what was then a wild region at the edge of the great pine forest. In the following year, when only nineteen years old, he took charge of the House Journal of the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature, which he carried to Philadelphia to be printed; a long and difficult journey at that time. In 1839 we find him at Madison, where he became editor of the Wisconsin Inquirer, owned by his brother Charles. In the following year he went to Kenosha, where he edited the Southport Telegraph, afterwards the Kenosha Telegraph, and four years later was appointed postmaster of the town.
Sholes’s activities as a journalist finally took him into Wisconsin politics, a career for which, in character and temperament, he was very poorly fitted. Nevertheless, he served two terms as state senator, in 1848 and 1849 from Racine County, and in 1856 and 1857 from Kenosha County. In 1852 and 1853 he represented Kenosha in the assembly. While a member of the council he was a witness of the homicide of one of the members by another, a tragedy made familiar to the world by Charles Dickens in “American Notes.” The account given by Dickens was taken from Sholes’s own paper, the Southport Telegraph. In 1860 Sholes removed to Milwaukee, where he had an active and varied career, first as postmaster, and later as commissioner of public works and collector of customs. He was also for a long time editor of the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and the Milwaukee News. It was in 1866, while serving as collector of customs for the Port of Milwaukee, that the invention of the typewriter enters the story.
CHRISTOPHER LATHAM SHOLES,