Inventor of the First Practical Typewriter.
On the personal side much more could be written concerning Sholes, for he was a man of very unusual and attractive character. Some might have called him an eccentric, but his eccentricities were of a kind which endeared him to everyone. He is described as one of the most unselfish, kind-hearted and companionable men that ever lived. He was also a man of extreme personal modesty, and of almost excessive tenderness of conscience, viewed from the usual business standpoint. He was always more than just to others and less than just to himself. Some phases of his character were a puzzle. As an editor he made it a rule to copy into his own paper all the adverse criticisms that were passed upon him by his political adversaries, and some of them were very bitter and unjust, and he would always omit all complimentary notice of himself and his work. Gentle and lovable, cultured and brilliant, modest and unselfish, these were the outstanding characteristics of Christopher Latham Sholes.
He was not the kind of man ever to make much money. In the days before the typewriter he had, by a fortunate chance, acquired wealth, but he did not keep it. The typewriter gave him another opportunity, but he let it pass. From first to last he was singularly indifferent to worldly fortune. One day, in his later years, he remarked to a friend that he had been trying all his life to escape becoming a millionaire and he thought he had succeeded admirably. He was always a visionary, and one of his visions was of a human Utopia which should witness the abolition of greed and poverty and the dawn of universal love. Call him a dreamer if you will, but one day he dreamed a dream which he proceeded to translate into a wonderful reality, which has placed the whole world in his everlasting debt.
The typewriter was not the first evidence of Sholes’s inventive genius. Years before he had been the first to conceive of the method of addressing newspapers by printing the names of subscribers on the margin. His more recent work on the machine for paging blank books brings us to the beginning of the typewriter story. But all else is now obscured by the memory of his crowning achievement, the invention of the writing machine.
What was the influence which caused these three men, Sholes, Soulé and Glidden, to drop the inventions on which they had been working and to pool their interests in a new and far greater undertaking?
According to one story, the idea arose out of a chance remark of Glidden’s, who had become interested in Sholes’s paging machine and one day said, “Why cannot such a machine be made that will write letters and words and not figures only?” Nothing further was said or done at the time, but in the summer of the following year (1867) a copy of the Scientific American, which quoted an article from a London technical journal, fell into the hands of Glidden. It described a machine called the “Pterotype,” invented by John Pratt, which was designed to do just what Glidden had suggested. This invention had inspired an editorial in the same issue of the paper which pointed out the great benefit to mankind which such a machine would confer, as well as the fortune that awaited the successful inventor. Glidden immediately brought this article to the attention of Sholes, and it appealed so strongly to his imagination that he decided to see what could be done.
General William G. LeDue, whose own interest in the invention of a typewriter dated back to 1850, and who subsequently was the first man to introduce the machine into the Government service at Washington, tells how, in 1867, he visited Milwaukee and found Sholes, together with Glidden, at work on the book-paging machine, and suggested to them the idea of a typewriter.
These two accounts are in no sense contradictory. When an idea is “in the air,” it is natural to find more than one influence at work. At any rate, we soon find Sholes working whole-heartedly on the new idea, assisted by Glidden and Soulé, both of whom had been invited to join in the enterprise. None of these men, so far as we know, had any knowledge at the time of any previous attempts to invent a typewriter, with the single exception of John Pratt’s “Pterotype” already mentioned. In the building of the new machine they were, at the outset, wholly dependent on their own creative efforts. All of them were amply endowed with inventive talent, but not one of the three was a mechanical engineer by profession, or even a mechanic by trade, and they needed the help of the skilled mechanics at Kleinsteuber’s machine shop in the carrying out of their ideas. Of these mechanics, Matthias Schwalbach is the man who figures most prominently in this story. Schwalbach had already helped Sholes in developing his paging machine, and, when the efforts of the three inventors were transferred to the typewriter, he entered into the new work with interest and enthusiasm. As the work went on Schwalbach began to do more than merely carry out the ideas of Sholes; he developed some ideas of his own which were of the greatest help to the inventors.
THE MACHINE SHOP WHERE SHOLES INVENTED THE TYPEWRITER