The history of the Milwaukee-invented typewriter
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It’s there every day underneath our fingertips when we draft an email or fire off a text message.
It’s so ubiquitous we forget that someone had to invent it, that it wasn’t always this way.
It was a Milwaukeean, Christopher Latham Sholes, who invented the first commercially successful typewriter in 1868. He also arranged the letters of the QWERTY keyboard – so named for the six top-left keys – that we still use more than 150 years later.
At first, Sholes’ typewriter typed only capital letters. But the technology improved over time, and it transformed a largely handwritten world. Suddenly, someone with something to say could express it faster than with a pen.
Recent generations likely never pounded out college essays and office memos on typewriters like the generations before them. But the tools they use now can be traced back to Sholes.
Today, typewriters live in a few places: at museums, on movie sets, on collectors’ shelves and in the homes of grandmothers who never moved into the digital age.
But QWERTY remains impervious to technological innovation. Though some might point out design flaws, this keyboard is all we know. It’s the backdrop to our online lives: our internet searches, our Yelp reviews, our dating-app bios.
It’s also a tether to our history, and a reminder that the click-clacking sound your phone’s keyboard makes is no accident.
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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: The history of the Milwaukee-invented typewriter
