The Lasting Effects of Latham Sholes Inventions E Fetherston

Christopher Latham Sholes was born in Mooresburg Pennsylvania in 1819. At the age of 18 he moved to Wisconsin to work for his brothers. Three years later he founded his own newspaper, The Southport Telegraph. He used the paper to reflect his political views and took stands against issues he believed were important, like capital punishment and war. He also used it to support the women's rights movement which was just taking off. Although he had a long career in journalism he is most known for his work as an inventor. In 1867 Sholes began work on his typewriter and in only a week he had a basic design. With the help of Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soule he had a prototype ready by the end of 1867. This first model was fairly inefficient but Sholes continued working on it and eventually developed a far better version. During this experimentation he developed the QWERTY keyboard, and this layout is still in use today. The QWERTY keyboard is the standard layout for English keyboards, and without Sholes this layout wouldn’t exist. This piece of art is meant to be a visual depiction of the legacy that Sholes invention has left, it started with a typewriter and then adapted to computer keyboards and is now standard on most cell phones.