The Sholes and Glidden Typewriter: How QWERTY Conquered the World in 1874

The Long Road to a Workable Machine

The idea of a machine that could impress type on paper mechanically — faster and more legible than handwriting — had been attempted numerous times before Christopher Latham Sholes and his collaborators produced their commercially successful model. Patents for typing machines date back to at least 1714, and various inventors throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries built working prototypes. Most were slow, complicated, and impractical: producing a typed page took longer than writing the same text by hand.

Sholes was a newspaper editor and Wisconsin state official who began experimenting with typing machines in the late 1860s, partnering with mechanical engineer Carlos Glidden and printer Samuel Soule. Their early prototypes were clumsy and frequently jammed, but they continued refining the mechanism. A crucial early breakthrough was the typebar arrangement: each key was connected to a metal arm with a type character on the end, and striking the key swung the arm against an inked ribbon pressed against paper. The challenge was preventing the arms of frequently used letter combinations from clashing and jamming.

Why QWERTY Was Designed the Way It Was

The keyboard layout that Sholes and his colleagues settled on — the one we now call QWERTY — has been the subject of much popular mythology. The common explanation that it was designed to slow typists down to prevent mechanical jams is an oversimplification. The actual design process was more empirical than deliberate: Sholes reorganized the keyboard several times in response to specific jamming problems, separating keys that were commonly used in sequence so that their typebars would have time to return to position before the adjacent bar was struck.

The arrangement also reflected practical input from telegraph operators, who were early adopters of the machine and whose feedback influenced the letter placement. The vowels and the most common consonants were placed in positions accessible to both hands, which is why the home row of QWERTY — ASDFGHJKL — is positioned where it is. The arrangement was not rigorously optimized by any modern ergonomic standard, but it was a considered response to the mechanical constraints of the machine and the habits of its earliest users.

Remington and Mass Production

Sholes eventually sold his patent rights to E. Remington and Sons, the firearms manufacturer that had diversified into sewing machines after the Civil War reduced demand for weapons. Remington's manufacturing expertise turned Sholes's prototype into a reliable, mass-produced product. The Sholes and Glidden Type Writer went on sale in 1874 at $125 — roughly $3,000 in modern terms — and was distributed through Remington's existing retail network.

Initial sales were modest; the machine was a novelty, and most businesses were skeptical that they needed it. Mark Twain, who purchased one early and enthusiastically, produced what may be the first typewritten manuscript submitted to a publisher. But the real market breakthrough came from an unexpected direction: the typewriter created entirely new employment opportunities for women in an era when clerical work was almost exclusively male. Because the typewriter was a new technology with no established male workforce attached to it, women could enter the field as "typewriters" — the job title for typewriter operators — without displacing existing male workers. By the 1890s, the female typist had become a social phenomenon, and the typewriter had become the standard tool of the modern office.

A Legacy Written Into Every Keyboard

The Sholes and Glidden machine established defaults — the QWERTY layout, the concept of a standard office keyboard, the expectation that written documents would be typed rather than handwritten — that proved almost impossible to dislodge. Multiple alternative keyboard layouts have been proposed and tested over the past century and a half, including August Dvorak's Simplified Keyboard of 1936 and various ergonomically optimized arrangements developed in subsequent decades. None has displaced QWERTY in mainstream use. The layout learned by the first generation of commercial typists became entrenched through training programs, habits, and the simple inertia of a network effect: changing the layout requires retraining every user and reprinting every textbook simultaneously, a coordination problem that has never been solved.

The QWERTY keyboard you are almost certainly using to read this article is a direct descendant of the decisions Sholes and his collaborators made in a Wisconsin workshop in the late 1860s, making the Sholes and Glidden typewriter perhaps the single piece of nineteenth-century technology most visibly present in twenty-first-century daily life.