Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Christopher Sholes, Danville and Mooresburg, Montour County

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.

The Danville marker stands at the intersection of
Northumberland Street (US 11) and Montour Street

It's perhaps a little ironic that the markers in today's post identify the subject by a name he himself never actually used when he was alive. Christopher Latham Sholes, for whatever reason, genuinely preferred his middle name and was more apt to identify himself using that. There is no record of him ever calling himself Christopher. I normally like to write about my subjects using their first names, because it makes them feel more like real people; but in light of his personal preferences, I'll compromise here and call him C. L., which was one of the names he himself used.

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 Harriet 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.  

C. L. founded his own newspaper, the Kenosha Telegraph, and also became an active politician - with multiple parties! He was a Wisconsin state senator as a Democrat, then served in the state assembly as a Free Soiler (a short-lived party which opposed slavery and eventually merged with the Republicans), and then again as a state senator, this time as a Republican. One of the most noteworthy points of his time in office was that, during his Republican term, the state senate was rocked by a railroad corruption scheme, and C. L. was one of the very few legislators who refused to accept a bribe. The picture of him seen here is a public domain image courtesy of WikiCommons.

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. 

The Mooresburg marker stands at the intersection of
Liberty Valley Road (PA 642) and Mooresburg Road,
at the Mooresburg One-Room Schoolhouse Museum

Partnering with his friends Samuel and Carlos (the latter mostly providing financial support), C. L. crafted a keyboard patterned after a piano, with black and white keys laid out in two rows. The keys were fashioned from ebony and ivory, set in a wooden frame, and the design was patented in 1868. By this time, inked ribbons had been invented by someone else, which made the machine practical for use. Because there was a lot of competition for making similar devices, they embarked on a letter-writing campaign (writing the letters on their typewriter, of course) and succeeded in garnering the interest of James Densmore, a fellow inventor in Meadville, Pennsylvania. James offered to buy an equal share of the patent, sight unseen, in return for covering all their expenses to date, which the trio eagerly accepted. When he did finally get to see the thing, however, he didn't like it and wanted the makers to improve it. Samuel and Carlos decided to bail at that point, so C. L. and James went in on it together.

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.

If you're a frequent typist, you can probably guess where I'm going with this. That's right - our friend C. L. is the one responsible for the insane-looking keyboard layout still in use today, generally known as the QWERTY keyboard. It's all his fault. QWERTY actually does make sense, as it was explained to me when I was taught how to type properly in the sixth grade (after two years of hunting and pecking with two fingers); the most frequently used letters are the most easily accessible to the dominant fingers. Like many fledgling typists, I went from thinking I would never get the hang of this nonsensical layout to wondering how I ever managed without it, and as someone who types literally every day of her life, I can't begin to guess how much time this has saved me. This blog would not be possible without such a method of typing quickly. So yes, it's all his fault, but it's also all to his credit. This public domain image of the very first QWERTY typewriter comes to us courtesy of WikiCommons and dates from 1912; it was photographed at the Buffalo History Museum in Buffalo, New York.

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!



Sources and Further Reading:

Brower, D. H. B. Danville: A Collection of Historical and Biographical Sketches. Lane S. Hart Publishers, 1881.

Cassingham, R. C. The Dvorak Keyboard. Freelance Communications, Arcata, California, 1986.






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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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