Christopher Latham Sholes | QWERTY keyboard, typewriter, printer | Britannica

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Christopher Latham Sholes (born February 14, 1819, near Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, U.S.—died February 17, 1890, Milwaukee, Wisconsin) was an American inventor who developed the typewriter.

After completing his schooling, Sholes was apprenticed as a printer. Four years later, in 1837, he moved to the new territory of Wisconsin, where he initially worked for his elder brothers, who published a newspaper in Green Bay. Shortly thereafter Sholes became editor of the Wisconsin Enquirer, in Madison. After a year, he moved to Southport (later Kenosha) to take charge of the newspaper there and soon entered politics, serving in the state legislature. In 1860 he became editor of the Milwaukee News and later of the Milwaukee Sentinel, a position he gave up to accept appointment from Pres. Abraham Lincoln as collector of the port of Milwaukee.

Sholes had already exhibited considerable inventive genius, and his new, less-demanding daily job gave him time to exercise it. In 1864 he and a friend, Samuel W. Soulé, were granted a patent for a page-numbering machine. A fellow inventor-mechanic, Carlos Glidden, suggested to Sholes that he might rework his device into a letter-printing machine and referred him to a published account of a writing machine devised by John Pratt of London. Sholes was so attracted by the idea that he devoted the rest of his life to the project.

With Glidden and Soulé, Sholes was granted a patent for a typewriter on June 23, 1868; later improvements brought him two more patents, but he encountered difficulty raising working capital for development. In 1873 he sold his patent rights for $12,000 to the Remington Arms Company, a firm well equipped with machinery and skill to carry out the development work that resulted in the machine being marketed as the Remington Typewriter. Sholes himself continued to make contributions to improving the typewriter, despite poor health during the last several years of his life.