A Wisconsin newspaper publisher in 1866 tried to automate ticket numbering. Then one question from a fellow inventor eventually helped create the typewriter and QWERTY keyboard we still use today

In 1866, Christopher Latham Sholes was working on a machine designed to automate something remarkably mundane: numbering coupons and tickets, a job that had previously been done by hand.

But when Sholes showed his invention to fellow inventor Carlos Glidden, Glidden saw something much bigger in it and asked, ‘Why can’t you make a machine that will print letters as well as figures?’

This inquiry helped set in motion a chain of inventions that would eventually change how people write, work and communicate, and leave behind something billions of people still use every day: the QWERTY keyboard.

From numbering tickets to building a machine that could write

Sholes, a Wisconsin newspaper publisher and former state senator, teamed up with Glidden and Milwaukee printer S.W. Soule to explore the idea of a machine that could print letters as well as numbers.

The three began working together in a shop on State Street near the Milwaukee River. Their early experiments were far removed from the familiar keyboard found on today's computers and phones.

The first Sholes and Glidden prototype used a semi-sequential keyboard layout, with all the letters in uppercase. It even used the capital “I” as a substitute for the number 1.

The machine underwent numerous changes as the inventors tried to make it practical. According to Smithsonian, they eventually produced around 30 test models before settling on the keyboard arrangement that would become QWERTY.

The machine that eventually created the QWERTY keyboard

There is still debate over exactly why Sholes and Glidden settled on QWERTY. Some historians have argued that the arrangement was intended to reduce mechanical jamming by separating frequently used letters. More recent historians have suggested that the layout may instead have been designed to help telegraph operators avoid common errors when transcribing Morse code.

Whatever the precise reason, the result became one of the most enduring designs in technological history.

The Sholes and Glidden typewriter was patented in 1868 by Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule. The patent was later sold to E. Remington & Sons, which began production on March 1, 1873, under the name Sholes and Glidden Type-Writer, according to the Library of Congress.

The machine eventually became known as the Remington typewriter and helped popularize the QWERTY keyboard layout that remains standard on modern computers.

How the typewriter changed everyday work

The significance of the typewriter went far beyond replacing handwriting. Before it, producing documents meant relying on pen and ink, with corrections often requiring an entire page to be rewritten. Preparing business documents, invoices, brochures and other material could also involve considerable work with printers.

The Library of Congress notes that by the late 19th century, businesses were already recognizing the typewriter as a major time- and labor-saving invention.

A September 14, 1884, report in the Salt Lake Herald described the machine as an especially powerful tool for reducing the amount of writing work required in business:

“Perhaps no invention of modern times has done so much to relieve business men of the great amount of pen-work drudgery to be done in every business, as the standard Remington type-writer.”

The same report claimed that an office worker with only two months of practice could produce more work than two skilled penmen and could also produce several copies at once.

The typewriter soon moved beyond offices. It became important in legal, medical, commercial and personal communication, making written material faster to produce and easier to read.

The QWERTY layout survived every technological revolution

The typewriter itself would eventually disappear from most workplaces, but its keyboard arrangement proved remarkably difficult to replace. The Library of Congress notes that the early success of the Sholes and Glidden machine spurred the development of competing designs. By 1901, typewriters had become common enough for one New York Tribune article to describe the machine as “that almost sentient mechanism.”

The Underwood No. 5, introduced around the beginning of the 20th century, became one of the most popular typewriters, with millions manufactured before production ended in 1932.

Yet even as typewriter manufacturers came and went, QWERTY remained. Smithsonian traces that continuity through later technological changes, from IBM's Selectric typewriter in 1961 to personal computers in the 1970s, the keyboard-equipped BlackBerry in 1999 and touchscreen phones and tablets in the 2010s.

The keys changed. The machines changed. The way people communicated changed. The arrangement of those letters largely did not.