Well, my friends, this is it! Today's quest is the final one for 2023. Next week I'll be doing my annual wrap-up and looking at all the weird and wonderful things I've experienced through this blog over the past year (there have been a lot!) and also examining the stats to see which posts have resonated with my readers the most, or at least went the most viral on social media. I'm continually befuddled to see which posts are getting hits, and I wish Blogger had a way to let me know how people are finding them, but it's exciting nevertheless.
Meanwhile, today's quest is a double whammy in Montour County. (Special hello to Shane Kiefer, at the Columbia-Montour Visitors Center - I promised I'd get one for you before the year was out! Thanks for your ongoing support.) Quite literally, the work I'm doing as I write this post would not be possible without the subject of today's post, and he's so important that he has two markers.
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| The Danville marker stands at the intersection of Northumberland Street (US 11) and Montour Street |
Our story begins with C. L.'s birth in Mooresburg on February 14, 1819. He was the second of three children of Orrin and Catherine (Cook) Sholes, with an older brother named Charles and a younger sister named Harriet. Their mother died the same year that Harriett was born, which suggests that she either died in childbirth or not long afterward. She's buried in Danville's Old Presbyterian Church Cemetery. This had to have been particularly hard on Orrin, whose first wife Cynthia had also died in childbirth after only a year of marriage, and the baby had also died.
As a young man, C. L. moved to Danville, where he apprenticed to a printer; there doesn't seem to be a whole lot written about his youth beyond this fact. Following his apprenticeship, the entire family moved to Wisconsin, first to Milwaukee and later to what became the community of Kenosha. Older brother Charles served in the Wisconsin legislature for a time and eventually became the mayor of Kenosha. Younger sister Harriett remained at home with their father, until she died in her twenties of unrecorded causes. C. L., meanwhile, got married in 1841 to Mary Jane McKinney of Green Bay, with whom he had ten children.
However, his political career was not as memorable to us as his printing career. Now, despite what the markers claim, he was technically not the inventor of the typewriter; various forms of the typewriter were created as early as 1714. No, C. L.'s contribution was a little bit different, and in fact, he didn't originally set out to create a typewriter at all.
Rather, with a fellow printer by the name of Samuel Soule, he set out to create a machine that would handle the onerous task of printing numbers on things like tickets, and their numbering machine was patented in 1866. They shared their creation with a fellow amateur inventor, Carlos Glidden, who wondered if it couldn't also be made to print letters and therefore words. This was probably in C. L.'s mind when he read a piece in the magazine Scientific American, which detailed John Pratt's invention called the "Pterotype." He read the article and decided that this design was too complicated for the average user, so he set out to make a better one.
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| The Mooresburg marker stands at the intersection of Liberty Valley Road (PA 642) and Mooresburg Road, at the Mooresburg One-Room Schoolhouse Museum |
The partners enlisted the help of stenographer James Clephane in Washington, D.C., who subjected the typewriter to such rigorous testing that he literally destroyed every model they sent him. Using his unwhitewashed recommendations, they set to work improving their design, and in 1873 they brought it to the Remington corporation in New York. Remington bought the patent from them and became the first commercial manufacturer of typewriters.
(My own first typewriter, a Christmas gift from my grandfather when I was nine years old, was a Remington. It was blue and I frequently caught my fingers between the keys, but I loved it all the same.)
So C. L. did not invent the typewriter, but he's remembered as "the father of the typewriter" because of his work on it. Also, while he didn't invent the machine itself, he did invent the name - typewriter being a short form of 'type writing machine' - so when people call him "inventor of the typewriter," they're factually correct... from a certain point of view.
Furthermore, his story doesn't end here. He went back to Wisconsin and continued tinkering with his design. In particular, he and James had been concerned about keystroke recovery; because the keys were returned to their resting position by weights rather than springs, the keys sometimes got stuck when common letter combinations were typed. The idea was to split up the most frequently used combos in order to prevent this.
He's also the one who came up with the idea of the shift key, to enable the use of both uppercase and lowercase letters. In newspaper printing, the letter blocks were stored in cases, with capital letters in the upper case and regular letters in the lower case, hence the names. Prior to the shift key's addition in 1878, typewriters could only type in uppercase, so typewritten articles required newspaper printers to figure out which letters were meant to be which. By creating the means to include both kinds of lettering on the typewriter, C. L. took away the guesswork and saved time. We don't have the printing blocks anymore, but we still call them uppercase and lowercase letters anyway.
C. L. spent his final years battling tuberculosis, to which he finally succumbed in 1890, just three days after his 71st birthday. He and Mary Jane, who had died two years earlier, are buried in the Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was survived by his ten children and many grandchildren, as well as by his incomparable contribution to technology.
Thanks for making this possible.
P.S. Happy Thanksgiving!
Except where indicated, all writing and photography on this blog is the intellectual property of Laura Klotz. This blog is written with permission of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. I am not employed by the PHMC. All rights reserved.
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