Christopher L. Sholes, Inventor of Typewriter, Born in Mooresburg, February 14, 1819

More than a score of attempts, both in this country and abroad, were made to perfect a typewriter after the birth of the idea in the mind of Henry Mill, an English engineer, who obtained a patent from Queen Ann of England, January 1, 1714, but none was successful.

It remained for an humble country boy, a printer, by the name of Christopher Latham Sholes, who was born in the little village of Mooresburg, Montour County, Pennsylvania, February 14, 1819, to perfect a model in the winter of 1866–67, which, after later improvements, was the basis for the typewriting machines which are now so much a part of commercial life throughout the world.

The patent granted to Henry Mill by Queen Ann never availed the imaginative engineer anything, because he lacked the essential ability to perfect a model which might be manufactured on a commercial basis. It is true, nevertheless, that he had the idea for a “writing machine for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after the other,” but this was not sufficient to be practical in any sense of the term.

The same difficulty that beset Mill prevented others from attaining success, and it was a century and a half before the actual birth of a commercial typewriter.

This interesting event was enacted in a small machine shop in the outskirts of Milwaukee. An interesting history was published recently by the Herkimer County (New York) Historical Society in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the manufacture of the first typewriter for commercial use. According to this story the principals were Carlos Gliden, the son of a successful iron monger of Ohio, who was engaged in developing a mechanical plow; Samuel W. Soule and Christopher Latham Sholes, both printers, who were engaged in developing a machine for numbering serially the pages of blank books, etc.

Sholes was the central figure in the association subsequently formed among the three. Sholes began his active life as an apprentice in the office of the Danville, Pa., Intelligencer.

The Intelligencer was then the oldest paper in Montour County, founded in 1828 by Valentine Best. At the time of Sholes’ apprenticeship the newspaper was a leading Democratic organ. The Intelligencer office was an excellent school for a boy when Christopher Sholes became the “devil” and began the career which was to stamp him as one of the great inventors of the country.

119Thomas Chalfant purchased the property July 15, 1861. He was a prominent Democratic politician, serving as member of the Legislature and as State Senator. He was a Civil War veteran and many years postmaster at Danville. Through all his various offices Chalfant devoted much time to his newspaper.

Sholes was diligent and progressed in his chosen profession, becoming in turn, editor of several newspapers and ultimately an owner. In 1866 he was collector of the port of Milwaukee and had held other public offices, including State Senator and Assemblyman.

Sholes’ subsequent invention of the typewriter is ascribed to inspiration he and Glidden obtained from a description of a machine invented by John Pratt, of Alabama, which, however, was very crude and impracticable.

The three friends engaged the services of skilled mechanics to help them in the construction of their typewriter, the first working model of which was completed in that small Milwaukee shop in the fall of 1866, but it was not until the following June that a patent was obtained for the invention.

This original machine had innumerable defects and was a crude and cumbersome affair, but it wrote accurately and rapidly, and after all that was their objective.

Sholes was the one of the trio who did most to produce this machine, and while he was not satisfied, he soon scored a notable triumph and made the machine its own best advertiser. A number of letters were written with it, among them one to James Densmore, then a resident of Meadville, Pa. Densmore was immediately interested. Like Sholes and Soule, he had been both printer and editor, and could realize the importance of such a machine.

The relationship between Sholes and Densmore was a strange meeting of opposites, the former was a dreamer and an idealist, the latter was bold, aggressive and arrogant and by some considered a plain “crank.”

Densmore was not impressed with the machine more than to regard the idea as feasible, but he determined to make an attempt at selling it to some firm with the facility and financial resources to manufacture it.

Densmore paid all the debts incurred by Sholes whereby he obtained an interest in the invention. He then engaged the services of a Mr. Yost, with whom he had been associated in a Pennsylvania oil business, and together they presented the proposition to the old firm of gun makers, E. Remington & Son, of Ilion, N. Y.

A tentative agreement was effected between the Remingtons and Sholes and his new partners, and the first contract signed for the manufacture of a typewriter for commercial use, the one built by Sholes was made in March, 1873.

The original contract was for the manufacture only, but in time the Remingtons acquired complete ownership.

120Sholes, soon thereafter, sold out his royalty right to Densmore for $12,000, which was a goodly sum in those days, but was the only reward that he ever received for his priceless invention and the years of earnest labor and expense he had bestowed upon it.

Densmore did not part with his royalty rights and was subsequently enriched.

Further improvements were made on Sholes’ invention when the skilled mechanics of the Remington factory were brought into service, but the fact remains that the Montour County printer was the inventor of the almost universally used typewriter and Densmore, another Pennsylvanian, was the medium by which the invention was saved from the scrap heap and commercially developed to the almost perfect machine of today. Thus Pennsylvania has given to the world the typewriter.