Christopher Latham Sholes was born on February 14, 1819, in Mooresburg, in Montour County, Pennsylvania, to Orrin Sholes and Catherine Sholes. His father received a reward in the form of a land in Pennsylvania for service in the war during 1812. In 1823 he moved with his family to Danville.
He attended the Danville School.
After completing his schooling, Sholes was apprenticed as a printer. Four years later, in 1837, he moved to the new territory of Wisconsin, where he initially worked for his elder brothers, who published a newspaper in Green Bay. Shortly thereafter Sholes became editor of the Wisconsin Enquirer, in Madison. After a year, he moved to Southport (later Kenosha) to take charge of the newspaper there and soon entered politics, serving in the state legislature.
In 1860 he became editor of the Milwaukee News and later of the Milwaukee Sentinel, a position he gave up to accept appointment from Pres. Abraham Lincoln as collector of the port of Milwaukee.
Sholes had already exhibited considerable inventive genius, and his new, less-demanding daily job gave him time to exercise it. In 1864 he and a friend, Samuel W. Soulé, were granted a patent for a page-numbering machine. A fellow inventor-mechanic, Carlos Glidden, suggested to Sholes that he might rework his device into a letter-printing machine and referred him to a published account of a writing machine devised by John Pratt of London. Sholes was so attracted by the idea that he devoted the rest of his life to the project.
With Glidden and Soulé, Sholes was granted a patent for a typewriter on June 23, 1868; later improvements brought him two more patents, but he encountered difficulty raising working capital for development.
In 1873 he sold his patent rights for $12,000 to the Remington Arms Company, a firm well equipped with machinery and skill to carry out the development work that resulted in the machine being marketed as the Remington Typewriter. Sholes himself continued to make contributions to improving the typewriter, despite poor health during the last several years of his life.
He suffered from tuberculosis from 1881 and finally succumbed to it on February 17, 1890.
He is known as the "Father of the Typewriter" as he invented the QWERTY keyboard. Though he was not the first inventor of a device that aided in impressing letters mechanically on papers, as such inventions dated back as early as 1714 by Henry Mill followed by others, Sholes is considered to have developed the first practical and commercially successful typewriter.
He embarked into politics and from 1848 to 1849 served ‘Wisconsin State Senate’ as member of Democratic Party, one of the two main contemporary political parties in the US.
Throughout the American Civil War he backed the Republican Party and President Abraham Lincoln.
In 1840 he married Mary Jane McKinney. They had ten children.
