Sholes Glidden Type Writer example essay topic
Sholes is the only typewriter inventor whose biography was written by more than one author and extensive details about his life are available. Sholes was printer and newspaper man who liked to tinker in a local workshop in Milwaukee, Wis., with his friend Soule. They were working on a machine that would automatically number pages. One day in 1867, Carlos Glidden, another of the local amateur inventors in the workshop, read an article about the Prat typewriter in Scientific American, and suggested to Sholes that he might transform his number stamping machine into a letter stamping machine. The team went to work and after their first attempt received funding from James Densmore, an oil man who had hear about their attempts. In all, Sholes and Glidden (Soule dropped out after the first attempts) produced more than 30 working models before they finally had built the machine that Remington & Son arms factory put into production in 1874.
The original Sholes & Glidden used the QWERTY keyboard, but typed in capitals only. It was sluggish, finicky, and inefficient machine. In five years, only 5,000 were sold, but Remington had plans. In 1878, the No. 2 machine was introduced.
It typed both upper and lower case, using shift key. Gone were the decorated panels in favor of a black open frame, establishing the archetype open-black-box look typewriters would have for decades to come. It took another decade, but the "Remington No. 2" became a huge success, and the Typewriter Industry was on its way.