bankbook pages. Before that, he hadn’t had much time for inventing. Born on a Pennsylvania farm in 1819, Sholes apprenticed himself as a printer and, by the time his family moved to Wisconsin, he was good enough to become state printer and take over the house journal of the territorial legislature. Eventually President Polk made him postmaster of what was to become Kenosha, and despite fragile health and a strain of self-effacement in his character, he entered politics and served a couple of terms as state senator. Only when he became collector of the port of Milwaukee—a job that was something of a sinecure—did he find the leisure to tinker with things. He was forty-eight years old when he began work on the project that would consume the rest of his life.

Just a few months after he had borrowed the carbon paper from the prescient Weller, Sholes, working with two mechanically minded friends, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule, completed his first typewriter. It wasn’t a portable. Built on the framework of a kitchen table, the huge machine drove type upward, pressing the paper against the ribbon. The result couldn’t be seen until the entire page was done, but the thing printed. All that remained was to market it and enjoy the bounty.

First, though, more capital was needed. Sholes remembered an acquaintance named James Densmore, who had made good money by inventing a tank car during the Pennsylvania oil boom. He wrote—that is, typed- him a letter. Densmore was interested and agreed to pay all expenses to date—six hundred dollars—and put “up future financing in return for 25 percent of the rights. Then, with everything formalized, Densmore came west to have a look at the machine.

He was horrified. It was crude, he said, and unmarketable. Make a better one. The incensed Densmore, a shaggy, red - haired, three - hundredpound giant, roared and bullied and was evidently the object of universal detestation. What he had, however, was an unwavering zealot’s belief in Sholes’s ability to make his typewriter work.

He hounded Glidden, Soule, and Sholes into producing model after model, sending each one out for testing as soon as it was finished. Weller played a part in this, pounding out the slogan of the Republicans then rallying behind Grant’s presidential campaign, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party,” and always finding something wrong. “I think the machine is now as perfect in its mechanism as I know how to make it …,” wrote Sholes in a typical, plaintive letter. “No, it’s not,” Densmore replied again and again.

The keys kept jamming. Sholes, who had originally arranged them alphabetically, worked out the most frequent combinations of letters in English, then scattered them as widely as possible so they’d be less likely to foul each other. Thus was born the QWERTY keyboard we use today. “So it turns out,” says the typewriter historian Donald

Sutherland, “that the most efficient wordprocessing, data-processing … equipment, no matter how sophisticated … and science-fictionish, is controlled from a keyboard that is a paragon of inefficiency because, sometime shortly after the Civil War, Christopher Latham Sholes had a sticky typewriter.”

Densmore, broke now but still ardent, kept up his haranguing, and Sholes, wild to be quit of it, kept making refinements. At last, in 1873, the Remington Company in Ilion, New York, then gearing down from making weapons, agreed to manufacture the machines. They sold slowly at first and made a glum showing at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition. But by the 188Os things were moving: five thousand Remington typewriters were sold in 1886, twice that number two years later, and something on the order of a hundred thousand by the turn of the century.

The harried Sholes probably made about twenty thousand dollars all told. But before he died in 1890, he saw an immense, unexpected consequence of his work: the typewriter had turned out to be an engine of liberation. The demand for “lady operators” was creating the first generation of women office workers. Sholes took particular pride in that. Usually the most modest of men, toward the end of his life he thundered: “Whatever I may have felt, in the early days, of the value of the typewriter, it is obviously a blessing to mankind, and especially to womankind. I am glad I had something to do with it. I builded wiser than I knew, and the world has the benefit of it.”