Wisconsin printer and inventor Christopher Latham Sholes secured patent protection for his 'Type-Writer,' developed with collaborators Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule. Manufactured commercially a few years later by E. Remington and Sons, the machine standardized the QWERTY keyboard layout still used today and transformed clerical work, giving rise to new professions and, notably, opening office jobs to women.
Christopher Latham Sholes was a newspaper editor tinkering in a Milwaukee machine shop when he and two partners, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, built a crude writing machine meant to number pages and print serial numbers. It printed slowly, jammed constantly, and looked nothing like the sleek machines of later decades, but the patent Sholes secured on June 23, 1868 protected the core mechanical idea.
Sholes kept refining the design for years, famously rearranging the keyboard layout specifically to slow typists down and reduce the jamming of mechanical typebars, an engineering compromise that accidentally became the QWERTY standard still used on keyboards worldwide, from typewriters to smartphones. He eventually sold his rights, and arms manufacturer E. Remington and Sons began mass-producing the 'Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer' in 1873.
The machine's arrival did more than speed up correspondence. Offices that once ran on handwritten ledgers and clerks reorganized around typing pools, and because typing was considered appropriately genteel work for women, the typewriter became one of the first widely available paths for American women into paid clerical employment. By the century's end, 'typewriter' referred as often to the person operating the machine as to the device itself.
Key people: Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden