QWERTY

Imagine a world without typing. No emails. No Word docs. No frantic clattering of keys under deadline stress. Just quills, ink smudges, and aching wrists from writing letters longhand. That was the reality until one determined man in Milwaukee set out to make writing faster, cleaner, and just maybe, a little bit revolutionary.

Christopher Latham Sholes didn’t start out trying to change the world. He was a newspaper man, a printer by trade and a Wisconsin legislator by choice. Practical, curious, and mechanically inclined, Sholes was tinkering with a page-numbering machine when the first sparks of a wild idea began to glow. What if, instead of just numbers, he could make a machine that wrote letters? Real words, on a page, faster than the hand ever could.

In 1868, he and his partners Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé filed for a patent on what they called a “Type-Writer.” It wasn’t the first attempt at such a machine, but it was the first one that didn’t break, jam, or become a glorified paperweight after a week. The U.S. Patent Office granted them Patent No. 79,265 on June 23, 1868, and with it came a tidal shift in how people would communicate forever.

Sholes didn’t see himself as a great inventor. He often downplayed his role, unsure of how useful the machine really was. But he kept building, kept revising. His workshop was a laboratory of noise and ink, full of wooden prototypes and bent metal. He was a man of the old world, trying to wrestle the future into something tangible. He knew how slow and inconsistent writing could be, especially in the growing world of business and bureaucracy. He thought his machine might ease that burden. He wasn’t trying to start a revolution. He was just trying to solve a problem.

The machine worked. Not beautifully. Not quickly. But it worked. It punched letters onto paper, one keystroke at a time, through a jumbled little contraption of levers and inked ribbon. And it jammed. Often. That’s where Sholes made a decision that would haunt typists for generations. To reduce jamming, he rearranged the keys to keep common letter pairs away from each other. That layout? Q-W-E-R-T-Y. And yes, it’s still the one you’re using today. Efficient? Not really. Familiar? Oh, you bet.

By 1873, the trio had caught the eye of E. Remington & Sons, a company better known at the time for sewing machines and rifles. They sold the rights for what amounted to around $12,000, depending on the agreement. And in 1874, the Remington No. 1 Typewriter hit the market. It was a clunky beauty, covered in floral decorations and designed like a parlor appliance—something proper ladies might keep next to their pianoforte. And that wasn’t by accident. The typewriter was marketed directly to women, opening up a new world of clerical work. It wasn’t just a tool. It was a passport into the workforce for countless women who, before this, had few professional options beyond domestic labor or teaching.

Of course, not everyone cheered this change. Social critics grumbled about women in offices, worried that typing too much might “unsex” them. But those arguments didn’t hold up long. Typing, once mastered, made you indispensable. In a rapidly industrializing America, businesses were hungry for speed and legibility. The typewriter didn’t just deliver both. It became a symbol of modernity.

In 1984, I made the “mistake” of letting my Chief and LPO find out that I could type…. the next month I was the new Weapons Department Yeoman. Months of typing TFR’s, Lesson learned, and of course, retyping the C8120 (Nuclear Weapons Manual) over… and over… and over… and over… until I was typing it in my sleep.

And writers? They loved it too. Mark Twain was one of the first to submit a typewritten manuscript. He hated the thing, of course. Said it was noisy and error-prone. But he used it. So did Henry James, Jack London, and a whole generation of scribes who swapped pen for key.

The typewriter was constantly improving. The Remington No. 2 introduced the shift key in 1878, letting users toggle between lowercase and uppercase. Later versions let users see what they were typing as they typed, a miracle for those sick of typing blind. Thomas Edison even experimented with electric typewriter technology as early as the 1870s, though practical models wouldn’t arrive until the 20th century. IBM’s Selectric in 1961 finally brought that vision to life with a golf ball-like typing head that danced across the page with astonishing speed and precision.

But it wasn’t just about hardware. The typewriter shaped the way people wrote, thought about communication, and structured their work. It created the modern keyboard layout. It birthed the idea of backspacing, margins, carbon copies, and the dreaded double space after a period. It taught us to type, to compose, to keep our fingers moving even when our brains hesitated. It turned writing from a slow, personal act into a fast, public one.

By the time computers arrived in the 1980s, the typewriter had already done the heavy lifting. The keyboard, that unsung extension of our hands, came from the same lineage. So did much of our digital behavior. You still type. You still use QWERTY. You still curse the backspace. The typewriter may be gone from most desks, but its ghost is everywhere.

Like many great inventions, the typewriter didn’t arrive in a flash of genius. It was messy, iterative, collaborative. It was born in a hot, sawdusty workshop by men who weren’t aiming to disrupt the world. And yet they did.

It gave people a way to speak more clearly, more quickly, and more widely than ever before. It changed what work looked like. It gave women jobs, gave writers tools, gave offices efficiency, and gave society a new rhythm.

All from a Milwaukee man who wanted to print page numbers.

Now that’s the kind of American ingenuity worth remembering.