Patented: The Machine That Taught the World to Type
On June 23, 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes and two partners received the patent for a writing machine that would put a keyboard under the world's fingers.
It looked, as one description memorably put it, like a cross between a piano and a kitchen table. It printed only in capital letters, demanded tissue-thin paper, and struck some early recipients as impersonal, even insulting. But the machine patented on June 23, 1868, was the ancestor of the keyboard beneath your fingers right now.
The story begins in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in a converted mill that served as Charles F. Kleinsteuber's machine shop. Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer and former newspaper editor, had built a machine for numbering book pages. His partners, fellow printer Samuel W. Soule and inventor Carlos S. Glidden, wondered whether the same principles could print letters. In July 1867, Glidden showed Sholes an article in Scientific American about a writing machine called the Pterotype. Sholes found it complicated and liable to get out of order — and was convinced he could do better.
By September 1867 they had a working model with a full alphabet, built with keys adapted from telegraph machines and type hammers borrowed from piano design. James Densmore, a businessman shown the device, bought a quarter interest for $600 — the cost of development to that point — and became the venture's driving force, though when he first saw the machine in March 1868 he declared it good for nothing except to show that its underlying principles were sound.
The patent — U.S. Patent 79,265 — was granted on June 23, 1868, to Sholes, Soule, and Glidden. Densmore rented a building in Chicago and built fifteen units before the money ran out. Then came years of grinding refinement: dozens of prototypes, a cylindrical platen adapted from earlier inventors' work so the machine could handle ordinary paper, and the slow evolution of the keyboard. The first model used piano-like keys in alphabetical order; the mechanics of the typebars made that arrangement jam, and through trial and error the now-famous QWERTY layout emerged, designed to keep frequently struck keys apart.
In early 1873, arms manufacturer E. Remington and Sons — looking to diversify after the Civil War — contracted to build the machine, and on July 1, 1874, the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, sold as the Remington No. 1, went on the market. It was still a "blind writer" — the typist could not see the words being typed — and at about $125, roughly an average person's annual income, it was no impulse buy. Mark Twain was among the first to own one. But businesses hungry for legible correspondence adopted it, and a thriving typewriter industry soon followed.
The typewriter's deepest legacy may be social rather than mechanical. As offices filled with the new machines, employers hired operators in large numbers — and many of those operators were women, giving thousands their first foothold in the clerical workplace. A device built by three Milwaukee tinkerers helped open the office door to half the population.
Every email you type owes a debt to June 23, 1868 — the day the keyboard got its patent.
No freely licensed contemporary image of the 1868 patent drawing could be verified for this story, so it appears without an illustration rather than with an uncertain one. The original printed patent drawing survives in the patent case files at the U.S. National Archives.