typewriter
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.
My co-worker is a high school student named, Amanda Ingram. Amanda is also taking a college class through the Boces program this summer. She is taking Wyoming History, and she was required to write a paper concerning the boom and bust cycle in Wyoming, using newspapers from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. She was given a public website to use to locate news articles for her paper. That intrigued me, and I decided to check out the site. The site allows you to look by city, county, year, or simply by all newspapers. When I went in to look, I of course, went for the oldest newspaper they had.
What I found was so exciting. That first newspaper in Wyoming was The Chugg Water Journal, out of Fort Laramie, published on October 2, 1949. For those who live in Wyoming, spelling Chugwater…Chugg Water is very strange. That made me think, mostly about what Chugwater meant anyway, and why it might be written Chugg Water for the newspaper. The word “chug” is 
said to describe the noise that the buffalo or the falling chalk made when it hit the ground or fell into the water under the bluff, depending on which version of the legend you wish to believe. Because of that, the Indians began to call the area “water at the place where the buffalo chug.” The White Man adopted the Indian name and called the area “Chug Springs.” Chugwater Creek was named after Chug Springs, and from that came the name of Chugwater. Still, the reason for the name of the paper is speculation on my part. I am assuming that it was in an effort to remain more or less purist about the name, and since Chug Springs came first, that might be reason the paper was named the Chugg Water Journal.
Aside from the name of the paper, I was very interested in the fact that it was hand written…at least at first. Of course, I knew that many newspapers were hand written at first, because there was no such thing as a printing press, or even typewriters for a long time, but to be able to actually view a handwritten newspaper was very exciting to me. My inquisitive mind embarked on a different thought journey. If the newspaper were hand written, and the 
town had 50 families in it, all of whom wanted a paper, how long would it take to write all those papers up? And was it the same person doing it? Wow!! After a time, you would know the news by heart, and it would become seriously old news. Then, when you consider the fact that the paper was to “appear occasionally and sometimes oftener, if not sooner”…whatever that actually meant, the news became really old.
Still, the paper and its possible contents intrigued me. I started thinking about different dates and events in Wyoming’s history that might have appeared in that and other Wyoming newspapers. Would a first-hand account be more accurate that the history books? Even if history’s account is accurate, the newspapers would provide the feelings of the writer, and that is pure gold, because that makes it personal. I found myself feeling very excited about my future visits to this and other old and handwritten newspaper sites. I know that I will find many treasures.
