Christopher Latham

Christopher Latham Sholes

The inventor of typewriter

"progress consists of renewing itself"

biography

inventions

Christopher Latham was an American inventor and politician, known for designing the first commercial typewriter and the "QWERTY" keyboard used today.

He was born February 14, 1819, and died February 17, 1890

Born in Mooresburg, in Montour County, Pennsylvania, Sholes moved to nearby Danville and worked there as a printer's apprentice. After completing his apprenticeship, Sholes moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1837, and then to Southport, Wisconsin (present-day Kenosha). He became a newspaper publisher and politician, serving in the Wisconsin State Senate from 1848 to 1849 as a Democrat, in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 1852 to 1853 as a Free Soiler, and again in the Senate as a Republican from 1856 to 1857. He was instrumental in the successful movement to abolish capital punishment in Wisconsin.

Typewriters were indispensable tools in offices around the world, as well as for literature, cinema, journalism, theater and any activity that required writing.

The first truly commercially successful typewriter was invented in 1872 by Christopher Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soulé. Sholes soon disowned the machine, refusing to use it or even recommend it. The patent was sold for $12,000 to Densmore and Yost.

The first industrial model was mounted on a standard sewing machine. They had a pedal similar to these. In this model, two important defects remained pending solution: writing was done only with capital letters and was hidden from the scribe; Furthermore, the machine was of enormous size, and on the other hand, had a very high price, so it was never launched on the market.

The first row was made of ivory and the second of ebony, the rest of the framework was wooden. Despite the evident prior art by Pratt, it was in this same form that Sholes, Glidden and Soule were granted patents for their invention on June 23, 1868[16] and July 14.[17] The first document to be produced on a typewriter was a contract that Sholes had written, in his capacity as the comptroller for the city of Milwaukee. Machines similar to Sholes's had been previously used by the blind for embossing, but by Sholes's time the inked ribbon had been invented, which made typewriting in its current form possible.

At this stage, the Sholes-Glidden-Soule typewriter was only one among dozens of similar inventions. They wrote hundreds of letters on their machine to various people, one of whom was James Densmore of Meadville, Pennsylvania. Densmore believed that the typewriter would be highly profitable, and offered to buy a share of the patent, without even having seen the machine. The trio immediately sold him one-fourth of the patent in return for his paying all their expenses so far. When Densmore eventually examined the machine in March 1867, he declared that it was good for nothing in its current form, and urged them to start improving it. Discouraged, Soule and Glidden left the project, leaving Sholes and Densmore in sole possession of the patent.

curious facts

It is worth paying attention to some interesting facts about the famous keyboard: Sholes' design did not contain the characters "1" and "0", since they could be replaced by the letters "I" and "O", which made the construction .

The keyboard that Sholes invented is called "QWERTY" and is named after the six letters in the upper left.

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