Christopher Sholes
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Christopher Latham Sholes (February 14, 1819 - February 17, 1890) is an American who contributed to the development of the typewriter.
Born in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, Sholes moved to nearby Danville as a teenager, where he worked as an apprentice to a printer. After completing his apprenticeship, Sholes moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He became a newspaper publisher and politician, serving in Wisconsin's state legislature in 1860.
He invented the typewriter in the year 1868. Along with Samuel W. Soule and Carlos Glidden, Sholes was granted a patent for the typewriter on June 23, 1868. His version of the typewriter was based on a page-numbering machine he received a patent for in 1864. Sholes sold the rights to his typewriter to the Remington Arms Company in 1872 for $12,000.
He continued to work on new developments for the typewriter throughout the 1870s, which included the QWERTY keyboard (1873). Sholes created the system after noticing that the type bars on many early typewriters jammed easily. The QWERTY layout moved the most-common pairings of letters apart, preventing any mechanical problems. It is still in use today on both typewriters and computers.