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Christopher Latham Sholes’s path to the typewriter began in printing and newspaper work, not with a plan to invent a keyboard. He served briefly as Milwaukee’s postmaster during the Civil War, later worked on a page-numbering device, and in 1867 joined a group developing a machine that could write letters. The familiar QWERTY layout emerged from that collaborative project, although historians disagree about exactly why its keys were arranged as they were.
Sholes was a printer, newspaperman, and Wisconsin politician
Born in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, in 1819, Sholes learned the printer’s trade in Danville. He moved to Wisconsin in 1837, joined his brothers’ newspaper in Green Bay, managed the Wisconsin Enquirer in Madison, and established the Southport Telegraph—later the Kenosha Telegraph—in 1840. The Wisconsin Historical Society biography describes him as both a newspaperman and an inventor.
His public career ran alongside his publishing work. The Wisconsin Historical Society records state senate terms in 1848–49 and 1856–57, an assembly term in 1852–53, and his role helping organize Wisconsin’s Free Soil and Republican parties. He also served briefly as Milwaukee postmaster during the Civil War, and later as port collector and commissioner of public works.
How page-numbering work led toward a typewriter
Sholes developed mechanical devices during his newspaper career, including a paging or numbering device dated 1864 and a newspaper addressing machine. The record supports the sequence from newspaper-related invention work to typewriter development; it does not establish that he invented or tinkered with the numbering machine while serving as postmaster.
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In 1867, Sholes was working on a page-numbering device in a Milwaukee machine shop when Carlos Glidden urged him to pursue a machine that could write letters as well as figures. According to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ landmark history, Sholes, Glidden, machinist Matthias Schwalbach, and Samuel Soule produced a functioning machine by fall that year. The Smithsonian Magazine account also recounts Glidden’s proposal to make a machine that printed letters, not just numbers.
It was a team effort, refined with outside funding
The early working machine was only the beginning. James Densmore helped finance continued development and pushed Sholes to test and improve the design. The ASME account describes nearly seven years of refinement before the machine was introduced for mass production in 1874.
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That history makes “Sholes invented the typewriter” an incomplete shorthand. Sholes was central to the work, but Glidden proposed the letter-writing direction, Schwalbach and Soule helped make the early machine, and Densmore funded and pressed the later development. E. Remington & Sons manufactured the Sholes & Glidden Type Writer, which reached the market in 1874. Smithsonian describes it as the first commercially successful typewriter. The original machine typed capital letters only; later models added capabilities. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History collection record documents a Sholes & Glidden Type Writer.
Why the Sholes & Glidden machine used QWERTY
The keyboard layout is called QWERTY for the first six letters across the upper-left of the familiar letter rows. The ASME history says Sholes and Densmore developed a nonalphabetical arrangement to reduce collisions between type-bars—the levers that struck the paper through an inked ribbon. If adjacent bars were triggered in quick succession, they could interfere with one another.
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That is a common explanation, but not a settled, single-purpose origin story. Smithsonian Magazine describes disagreement among historians: some emphasize spacing frequently used letters to reduce jamming, while others suggest the layout helped telegraph operators avoid transcription errors when turning Morse code into text. The available accounts therefore support describing jam reduction as one explanation, not as the conclusively proven reason for every key position.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the postmaster and Lincoln claim gets wrong
Sholes’s brief Civil War-era service as Milwaukee postmaster is documented by the Wisconsin Historical Society. The sources cited here do not confirm that Abraham Lincoln appointed him to that particular office. A Wisconsin 101 search result instead associates a Lincoln appointment with Sholes’s later role as collector of the Port of Milwaukee. Without an appointment record that resolves the distinction, the postmaster claim should not be stated as fact.
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Likewise, the surviving accounts place the 1864 numbering device in Sholes’s newspaper and invention work but do not substantiate that he worked on it “on the job” as postmaster. The supported connection is that, in 1867, page-numbering work in a Milwaukee machine shop led into the collaborative effort to build a machine for writing letters.
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