Sholes and Glidden Typewriter (1868): The Birth of QWERTY

The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, patented by Christopher Latham Sholes and his partners in Milwaukee on 23 June 1868, became the first commercially successful typewriter. After years of refinement it was sold to the arms makers E. Remington and Sons, who put it on the market in 1874. Its keyboard gave the world the QWERTY layout still used on computers and phones today.

Background: the search for a writing machine

Inventors had tried to build writing machines since at least 1714, when the Englishman Henry Mill received a patent for an idea of this kind. In the nineteenth century dozens of devices appeared, including the Danish pastor Rasmus Malling-Hansen’s “writing ball” of the 1860s. Most were slow, expensive or unreliable, and none achieved wide sales.

Demand for faster writing was growing. Businesses, courts and governments produced ever more letters and records, while the electric telegraph created a new need to transcribe messages quickly and legibly.

Sholes, Glidden and Soule

Christopher Latham Sholes, born in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, on 14 February 1819, was a printer, newspaper editor and politician in Wisconsin. In 1867, while working on a page-numbering machine at Charles Kleinsteuber’s machine shop in Milwaukee with the printer Samuel W. Soule, he was encouraged by the inventor Carlos Glidden to build a machine that could type letters.

The three men produced a working model, and the patent “Improvement in Type-Writing Machines” was granted on 23 June 1868, with a second patent following that July. The early machine had keys arranged roughly like a piano keyboard, in alphabetical order.

The businessman James Densmore bought a share and pushed Sholes to keep improving the design. Over the next five years Sholes built dozens of versions, which Densmore had tested by stenographers and telegraph operators, whose criticisms led to many changes.

From Milwaukee to Remington

In 1873 Densmore and his partner George Washington Newton Yost reached an agreement with E. Remington and Sons, makers of firearms and sewing machines in Ilion, New York. Remington’s engineers refined the machine for mass production, and it went on sale in 1874 as the Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, priced at about 125 dollars.

The machine typed only capital letters, and its typebars struck the paper from beneath, so typists could not see what they had written without lifting the carriage. Sales were slow at first, but the improved Remington No. 2 of 1878 added a shift key for lowercase letters and became a commercial success. Sholes sold his rights early and earned relatively little from the invention.

Other makers soon entered the market with rival designs, including machines that let typists see the text as it was written. Remington nonetheless kept a strong position, and the term “typewriter”, first used as a trade name for the Sholes and Glidden machine, became the general word for all such devices.

The origin of QWERTY

Sholes changed the order of the keys many times. A layout close to modern QWERTY appeared on the 1874 machine, and Sholes’s patent of 1878 shows the arrangement in nearly its present form.

The traditional explanation is that Sholes separated letters often typed together, so that neighbouring typebars would not collide and jam. Research by Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka has argued that the layout was also shaped by feedback from telegraph operators, who needed to transcribe Morse code quickly. The full story was probably a mix of mechanical and practical pressures rather than a single design goal.

Once typists had been trained on QWERTY, the layout became hard to change. Alternatives such as August Dvorak’s keyboard of 1936 never displaced it, and it passed to electric typewriters, computer keyboards and touchscreens.

Legacy

The typewriter transformed office work. By the 1880s and 1890s typing schools were training large numbers of young women, and the typist became a symbol of the modern office. This opened paid clerical employment to women on a scale not seen before.

Writers too adopted the machine; Mark Twain was among the early buyers of a Remington. Typewriters remained essential until word processors and machines such as the IBM Personal Computer replaced them in the late twentieth century, but their keyboard lives on in almost every digital device. Sholes died in Milwaukee on 17 February 1890.

Timeline

• 1714: Henry Mill receives an English patent for a writing machine.
• 1867: Sholes, Glidden and Soule begin work on a typewriter in Milwaukee.
• 1868, 23 June: Their first typewriter patent is granted.
• 1873: E. Remington and Sons agrees to manufacture the machine.
• 1874: The Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer goes on sale.
• 1878: Sholes patents a nearly modern QWERTY layout; the Remington No. 2 adds a shift key.
• 1890, 17 February: Christopher Latham Sholes dies in Milwaukee.

Why it matters

The Sholes and Glidden typewriter brought mechanical writing into everyday business and changed who worked in offices. Its most lasting legacy is the QWERTY keyboard, a nineteenth-century compromise that still shapes how billions of people type.