On June 23, 1868, a patent was issued to Milwaukee printer Christopher Sholes for the “type-writer,” a little machine that, as Dan Piepenbring wrote, “looks like a miniature piano crossed with a clock and/or a phonograph and/or a kitchen table.” Though Sholes would eventually invent the QWERTY keyboard, in the first iteration, the keys were laid out like this:
3 5 7 9 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
2 4 6 8 . A B C D E F G H I J K L M
Yikes! Sholes was a journalist and politician, wrote Katie Yee. But also, just for fun, an inventor.
In his spare time, he and Samuel W. Soulé, a mechanist, developed devices that numbered the pages of blank books. They shared their shop with a third inventor, Carlos Glidden, and the trio used the numbering machine as the basis for a personal lettering machine, now known as the typewriter.
Here’s how it works: When you strike a key, a tiny hammer that’s attached to a lettered type is pushed through a circular brass disk. The disk guides the type to a point where it hits the ink ribbon. The paper is set in a frame above this and slides from left to right when you hit the correct key.
In their original patent application, the diagram showed 21 keys, but the prototype they submitted held only 11. (Inventors were required to send scale models along with their applications.) Another fun twist: the keys were originally piano keys. (You know Writers; they make do with what they have.) Still, it worked!
Well, enough for a patent anyway. “Sholes and his companions went through years of prototypes, and fell deeply into debt, before they arrived at a marketable model,” writes Piepenbring, “and even then, in 1874, no one really wanted the typewriter, known by that point as the Remington 1. It cost $125, a small fortune for the day, and typewritten correspondence was stigmatized as impersonal and impolite. Sholes faced competition from a league of rival manufacturers, many of whom he’d once worked with.” Eventually, of course, the typewriter would eventually become the standard way to write, and then once that was over, the coolest way to respond to internet-age interview questions. What a legacy.
