A Symphony of Clicks and Clacks

June 23, 1868

When Christopher Sholes started in the news business, the process was an incredibly laborious one. Articles were written by journalists with a pen and paper, editors made changes with a pen, and dictated page layout, and printers had to set that handwritten text in movable type.

It wasn’t exactly the ideal workflow. (A modern journalist whose pieces can go from germinated idea to the front page of a website within a few hours might wonder how anything ever got printed accurately.) But, as it happens, printing in the late 1830s, and editing newspapers in the 1840s and ‘50s, were both consuming jobs with little to no downtime.

Which is probably why Sholes didn’t try to fix the workflow problem until the 1860s, when President Abraham Lincoln appointed him as a collector for the port of Milwaukee.

At the time, typography machines (early typewriters) did exist. But neither William Burt nor John Pratt ever managed to get their machines to take off commercially.

For Sholes and his friend Samuel Soule, the inspiration was the telegraph key. What if, they mused, you put the “w” from a movable type set at the end of that telegraph key, inked it, and then struck a piece of paper? And what if you had a key for every letter, number, and punctuation mark? By June 23, 1868, Sholes and Soule were ready to file a patent for their little letter hammers, which, by now, looked considerably more complicated than a telegraph key.

Remington No. 1, produced between 1873 and 1878.

But like Burt and Pratt, the commercialization of a machine that actually used the invention was difficult, and the project (after a series of improvements) petered out. Sholes eventually sold his share of the rights to a Pennsylvanian named James Densmore (one of the early typewriter enthusiasts) who took the plans with him to E. Remington & Sons, a munitions manufacturer turned sewing machine producer.

In 1873, the first typewriter hit the market, and even though it cost $125 ($3,348.59 today), it revolutionized the writing industry. Not only was copy easier and cleaner to read — especially for editors, printers, lawyers, and record keepers — but once writers got used to the odd key layout (which was standardized in the 1890s) it was much faster.

In just a few decades, writing went from a hand-cramping process to a symphony of clacks, clicks, and dings.