On the off chance that you ever use a computer keyboard, you may be either glad or annoyed that today is the birthday of Christopher Latham Sholes, who invented the QWERTY keyboard. Sholes invented the keyboard as part of the Sholes and Glidden typewriter, which he invented, along with Carlos Glidden, in the late 1860s.
Sholes would not want you referring to him as simply “Christopher Sholes;” he always went by his full name or by C.L. Sholes — even sometimes by “Latham Sholes.” He was born in Pennsylvania in 1819 and learned printing as an apprentice. When he was 18 he moved to Wisconsin, got married, and became a newspaper publisher. A few years later he entered politics and became a state senator. He used his office and his newspaper to campaign against capital punishment in Wisconsin, and succeeded. Then in 1856 there was a huge scandal in the state government; railroad companies were discovered bribing politicians. Sholes was one of the few who refused to be bribed.
Sholes got interested in typewriters when he wanted to create a machine to automatically put numbers on paper, from book pages to tickets. He and a fellow printer, Samuel Soule, patented a numbering machine in 1866. Then they showed their machine to Carlos Glidden, who wondered if it could be adapted to also print letters and words. There were already some similar inventions, but none of them worked very well. The team decided to try to build their own, and got the name “typewriter” from an article in Scientific American magazine. Luckily that was the name they selected — the same article also called similar machines “literary pianos.”
The machine they came up with actually worked pretty well, and was unique enough to earn two patents in 1868. At that point, James Densmore purchased a one-fourth share of the patents, which paid all the expenses of the machine up to that point. But Densmore concluded that the typewriter wasn’t good enough to sell yet, and set the team back to work improving it. Soule and Glidden quit, but Sholes and Densmore persisted and came up with Version 2. And in a genius stroke of user testing, they sent versions to several stenographers to try out.
One of the stenographers was James Clephane, and he tested the machine to destruction. No, really, he broke it. They adjusted the design, sent him a new model, and he broke that too. They kept that up for quite a while, and the whole time Clephane was also sending comments so critical that Sholes almost gave up in discouragement. But they kept going until they’d built about 50 typewriters, and Clephane was finally satisfied.
The typewriters were expensive to build — about $250 each, which would be over $5000 today. So they needed funding. They approached the Remington manufacturing company, which decided to buy in. Sholes sold his half of the patents for $12,000, which was quite a fortune in 1873. But Densmore negotiated a royalty instead, so he eventually got over $1.5 million.
Sholes designed the QWERTY keyboard arrangement to be purposely inefficient. The machines would jam when letters used in combination were typed too fast. the QWERTY layout was designed to slow typists down to reduce jamming. Jamming hasn’t been a problem for at least a century, but we’re still stuck with that keyboard, simply because it became ubiquitous by the late 1870s and none of the more efficient designs since have supplanted it. So like I said, we can either celebrate or curse Sholes’ birthday today!
