Christopher Latham Sholes

Christopher Latham Sholes was an American inventor who invented the QWERTY keyboard, that most people are would recognize today. Also, along with Samuel W Soule, Carlos Glidden, and John Pratt, he is said to be one of the inventors of the first typewriter in the United States. In addition, Sholes was a newspaper publisher and Wisconsin politician. Sholes was born February 14, 1819, in Mooresburg, in Montour County, Pennsylvania, to Orrin and Catherine (Cook) Sholes. He later moved to nearby Danville and worked as an apprentice to a printer there. I rather don’t think he liked his first name, because over the course of his life, he went be a number of names, including, C. Latham Sholes, Latham Sholes, or C. L. Sholes, but never Christopher Sholes or Christopher L. Sholes.

In 1837, after completing his apprenticeship, Sholes moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and later to Southport, Wisconsin (now named Kenosha). On February 4, 1841, in Green Bay, he married Mary Jane McKinney. Together they had ten children, Charles Latham Sholes born 1843, Clarence Gordon Sholes born 1845, Mary Katherine (Tyrrell) born 1847, Frederick Sholes born 1847, Louis C. Sholes born 1849, Elizabeth (Gilmore) born 1852, Lillian (Fortier) born 1856, George Orrin Sholes born 1859, Jessie Sholes born 1861, and Zalmon Gilbert Sholes born 1864.

He became newspaper publisher and politician, serving in the Wisconsin State Senate from 1848 to 1849 as a Democrat, in the Wisconsin State Assembly from 1852 to 1853 as a Free Soiler, and once more in the Senate as a Republican from 1856 to 1857. He played a pivotal role in the successful effort to abolish capital punishment in Wisconsin. His newspaper, The Kenosha Telegraph, covered the trial of John McCaffary in 1851. Then, in 1853 he spearheaded the campaign against capital punishment in the Wisconsin State Assembly. Equally significant was Sholes’ involvement in the massive railroad corruption scandal that engulfed the legislature 1856. He was one of the few decent legislators who rejected the bribe that was offered.

While Sholes did not invent the keyboard, itself, he integrated and innovated upon the work of prior inventors in this area. The QWERTY layout on the typewriter was designed to slow typing so as to prevent the jamming of typewriter keys from too-fast typing. What strikes me as funny is that this design has continued, despite the fact that jamming is no longer a problem for computer keyboards. Some have suggested alternative keyboards would be more efficient…for instance, the Dvorak keyboard. While that keyboard might be more efficient, the time and work that would be involved in the changeover from QWERTY would be something akin to changing from inches to the metric system. Some people have embraced the metric system, but many, including myself, have not. I just can’t begin to imagine switching from QWERTY to Dvorak.