The First Type Writer

The first type writer was called the “Sholes &Glidden Type Writer,” and it was produced by the gun makers E. Remington & Sons in Ilion NY from 1874-1878. It was not a great success (not more than 5,000 were sold), but it started a worldwide industry, and it brought the mechanization to dreary, time-consuming office work.

Christopher Latham Sholes was the creative genius behind the first typewriter to be produced. Many of the basic principles that he introduced set standards for the industry.

Sholes is the only typewriter inventor whose biography was written by more than one author and extensive details about his life are available. Sholes was printer and newspaper man who liked to tinker in a local workshop in Milwaukee, Wis., with his friend Soule. They were working on a machine that would automatically number pages. One day in 1867, Carlos Glidden, another of the local amateur inventors in the workshop, read an article about the Prat typewriter in Scientific American, and suggested to Sholes that he might transform his number stamping machine into a letter stamping machine.

The team went to work and after their first attempt received funding from James Densmore, an oil man who had hear about their attempts. In all, Sholes and Glidden (Soule dropped out after the first attempts) produced more than 30 working models before they finally had built the machine that Remington & Son arms factory put into production in 1874.

The original Sholes & Glidden used the QWERTY keyboard, but typed in capitals only. It was sluggish, finicky, and inefficient machine. In five years, only 5,000 were sold, but Remington had plans.