The Machine That Created the First Generation of American Working Women

In the spring of 1873, a fifty-four-year-old newspaper editor from Milwaukee sat down at a small table and wrote a letter to a friend. He was tired. He had spent the last seven years of his life on a single invention — a strange machine that sat on a table the size of a kitchen counter, a tangle of brass rods and wooden keys that looked like, in his own words, a cross between a piano and a sewing machine. He had nearly gone bankrupt building it. But on that day in 1873, he wrote a single line that captured everything he had hoped his invention might do. "I do feel," he wrote, "that I have done something for the women who have always had to work so hard. This will enable them more easily to earn a living." He was right. He had no idea how right. In 1870, only two and a half percent of clerical workers in the United States were women. By 1930, that number was over fifty-two percent. Tens of millions of American women would walk into offices, banks, government buildings, hospitals, and newspapers across this country and begin earning their own wages, controlling their own income, and standing on their own feet — for the first time in American history. Almost every one of them would do it sitting in front of a Sholes typewriter. This is the story of Christopher Latham Sholes, a Pennsylvania farm boy who apprenticed himself to a printer at the age of fourteen, moved west to Wisconsin as a young man, served in the state legislature, and spent seven years of his life in a small workshop on State Street in Milwaukee, building a machine that almost nobody believed in. It is the story of how the QWERTY keyboard you are looking at right now was designed in 1873 — and why the letters are arranged in that strange order. It is the story of how a small contract with the Remington Arms Company of Ilion, New York, set off the largest economic transformation in American women's history. And it is the story of a humble inventor who, near the end of his life, said the only thing he was really proud of was what his machine had done for working women. History is everywhere.