Invention of the Typewriter
Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, Wisconsin
Marker Inscription
Invention of the typewriter. At 318 State Street, approximately 300 feet northeast of here, C. Latham Sholes perfected the first practical typewriter in September, 1869. Here he worked during the summer with Carlos Glidden, Samuel W. Soule, and Matthias Schwalbach in the machine shop of C. F. Kleinsteuber. During the next six years, money for further development of the typewriter was advanced by James Densmore, who later gained the controlling interest and sold it to E. Remington and Sons of Ilion, N.Y.
Erected by Wisconsin Historical Society
The Story
In the summer of 1869, in a Milwaukee machine shop, printer and inventor C. Latham Sholes and his collaborators perfected the first practical typewriter. Backing from James Densmore carried the design through years of refinement until it was sold to E. Remington and Sons of Ilion, New York, whose factories brought the machine to the world.
Why it matters
The typewriter transformed business, journalism, and the office—and opened new careers to American women.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1869, Milwaukee was a fast-growing industrial city, part of the workshop belt that was turning the post-Civil War North into a manufacturing powerhouse. The Gilded Age was dawning, and small machine shops full of tinkerers and skilled mechanics were quietly inventing the tools of modern life.
Business and communication were still done almost entirely by hand. Letters, contracts, ledgers, and newspapers all depended on human penmanship, which was slow and often hard to read. The pressure was building for some machine that could put words on paper as fast and as clearly as type in a print shop.
Into that world stepped a printer and inventor with the mechanical instincts and the print-shop knowledge to see the problem clearly. A city humming with machine shops was exactly the right place to try to solve it.
People & events
The marker credits C. Latham Sholes with perfecting the first practical typewriter in September 1869, and it names the collaborators who worked alongside him through the summer: Carlos Glidden, Samuel W. Soule, and Matthias Schwalbach, laboring in the machine shop of C. F. Kleinsteuber. It was a shared, hands-on effort, the kind of workshop teamwork that so many inventions actually require.
Getting a machine to work is one thing; carrying it through years of refinement is another. That is where James Densmore comes in. According to the marker, Densmore advanced the money that funded further development over the next six years, eventually gaining the controlling interest in the invention — the financier whose faith and cash kept a promising prototype moving toward something sellable.
The final turn in this local story points east. Densmore sold the invention to E. Remington and Sons of Ilion, New York — a firm with the factories and know-how to manufacture the machine at scale. The idea was born in a Milwaukee shop; the means to mass-produce it lay elsewhere.
Its place in the American story
The practical typewriter reshaped the everyday texture of American working life. Offices, newsrooms, and businesses gradually shifted from handwritten pages to crisp, uniform type, and the speed and clarity of written communication took a long stride forward. A tool refined in one machine shop rippled out into nearly every office in the country.
Its social consequences were just as large. As typewriters spread through American business, they helped open the office to a wave of women entering paid clerical work — a genuine shift in who worked where, and one of the quieter revolutions of the era.
There's also a very American arc in how it traveled: invented and perfected by a handful of collaborators in a Midwestern workshop, funded by a persistent backer, and then handed to an established manufacturer that put it into the world. Invention, investment, and industry, each playing its part.
If you visit
The marker points you to a very specific spot — the invention site was at 318 State Street, roughly 300 feet northeast of the plaque. Half the fun here is the precision: you can stand in downtown Milwaukee and know you're within a stone's throw of where the machine was perfected.
Don't expect the original machine shop; this is a working city street, and the plaque, placed by the Wisconsin Historical Society in 1956, does the remembering. Read it, then look around at the ordinary urban block and let the contrast sink in — world-changing work in an unassuming place.
It makes a great addition to a downtown Milwaukee walk for anyone who loves the history of everyday technology. Picture the tinkering, the trial and error, and the clatter of the first practical keys, and you'll never look at a keyboard — the distant descendant of what happened here — quite the same way again.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · C. Latham Sholes
- · Carlos Glidden
- · Samuel W. Soule
- · Matthias Schwalbach
- · James Densmore
Themes & tags
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