Today in 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel W. Soule of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were granted a patent for a “Type-Writing Machine” (US No. 79,265).
The device was only equipped with capital letters and typists couldn’t tell if they were making errors because the paper could not be seen as one is typing. An improvement upon their earlier type-writing machine, its new features were “a better way of working the type-bars, of holding paper on the carriage, of holding, applying, and moving the inking-ribbon, a self-adjusting platen, and a rest or cushion for the type-bars to follow.” The device also featured the QWERTY keyboard which will be used for typing for decades to follow.
In 2006, a Boston Globe article described the fate of typewriters today: “When Richard Polt, a professor of philosophy at Xavier University, brings his portable Remington #7 to his local coffee shop to mark papers, he inevitably draws a crowd. ‘It’s a real novelty,’ Polt said. ‘Some of them have never seen a typewriter before … they ask me where the screen is or the mouse or the delete key.’”