Inventor of the QWERTY keyboard and one of the first practical typewriters, Sholes transformed written communication. Born in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, he moved to nearby Danville as a teenager, where he worked as an apprentice to a printer. After completing his apprenticeship, he moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1837. Sholes became a newspaper publisher and politician, serving in the Wisconsin State Senate 1848–1849, 1856–1857, and the Wisconsin State Assembly 1852–1853.
Sholes had moved to Milwaukee and became the editor of a newspaper. Following a strike by compositors at his printing press, he tried building a machine for typesetting, but this was a failure and he quickly abandoned the idea. He arrived at the typewriter through a different route.
His initial goal was to create a machine to number pages of a book, tickets, and so on. He began work on this at Kleinsteuber's machine shop in Milwaukee, together with a fellow printer Samuel W. Soule, and they patented a numbering machine on November 13, 1866.
