Christopher Latham Sholes

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Although different such tools were worked on for hundreds of years, it was Charles Latham Sholes who was awarded a patent in 1868 for what would become the first commercially successful typewriter. It was the “Sholes and Glidden Type-writer” that gave the machine its popular name, also introducing the QWERTY keyboard, which was aimed at slowing down typists so that the keys on these crude early gadgets would not become entangled. The contraption also helped transition women into the workforce, even if the initial jobs were low-level ones. Below is an article from the September 16, 1923 Brooklyn Daily Eagle marking the moment when Sholes’ creation reached a particularly nice round number.

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