Christopher Latham Sholes: 1819 – 1890

Christopher Latham Sholes Christopher Latham Sholes: February 14, 1819–February 17, 1890

I recently visited the location in Milwaukee where the typewriter was invented. At the corner of Fourth and State Streets a historical marker reads, “At 318 State Street, 300 feet northeast of here, C. Latham Sholes perfected the first practical typewriter in 1869. Here he worked with Carlos Glidden, Samuel W. Soulé and Matthias Schwalbach in the machine shop of C. F. Kleinsteuber.”

With Kleinsteuber’s work shop long gone, the marker stands on the property of US Cellular Arena, former home of the Milwaukee Bucks and several other professional sports teams. The 12,700-seat indoor arena was built in 1968. The Bucks and the other teams moved across State Street to the newer 18,000-seat BMO Harris Bradley Center … built a mere twenty-five years ago.

The modern surroundings of the typewriter’s birthplace are a reminder of how much time has passed since Sholes’ invention “freed the world from pen slavery.” Fortunately, a surviving photo of Kleinsteuber’s machine shop provides a glimpse into what life was like for Milwaukeeans between the Civil War and the automobile.

Kleinsteubers Machine Shop Photo of Kleinsteuber’s machine shop where Sholes, Glidden, Soulé and Shwalbach invented and perfected the first practical typewriter in 1869.

Christopher Latham Sholes was born February 14, 1819 in Mooresburg in Montour County, Pennsylvania, not far from the country seat of Danville. Sholes was born in a cellarless loghouse, eighteen feet square, a story and a half and with four windows.

After his family moved to Danville, Christopher’s mother Catherine Cook Sholes died in 1826 when he was seven. His father Orrin Sholes was a cabinetmaker and he had a workshop in town. While attending Henderson’s school in Danville, Christopher worked in his father’s cabinet shop. After graduation at age fourteen, he was apprenticed to the printing trade as a shop “devil” on the Danville Democratic Intelligencer.

By the time Sholes achieved master printer status at age eighteen, his family decided to move to Green Bay, Wisconsin. Encouraged to make the 750-mile trek by President Andrew Jackson’s proclamation of public land sales, the Sholes were among the frontline of settlers who relocated to the Territory of Wisconsin.

Christopher’s older brother Charles had established himself as a printer and political figure in the area. Prior to the arrival of the family, Charles had become the publisher and editor of the Green Bay Democrat. The elder Sholes would go on, following Wisconsin statehood in 1848, to serve in both houses of the state legislature and as well as mayor of Kenosha.

With a combination of his brother’s influence and his own exceptional talents, Christopher was appointed official printer and took charge of the House Journal of the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature. At age twenty, he became editor of the Wisconsin Enquirer, a Madison publication owned by his brother.

In 1840, Christopher moved to Southport (later Kenosha). He launched and became editor of the Southport Telegraph. The paper took its name from the invention of Samuel Morse. Sholes recognized the telegraph as a breakthrough communications technology that would improve the speed of news distribution. In 1844, he also became town postmaster.

Inevitably, like his brother, Christopher entered politics. He served two terms (1848-49 and 1956-57) in the state senate and one term in the assembly (1852-53).  In 1860, Sholes moved to Milwaukee where he became postmaster and commissioner of public works. He was also at different times editor of the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel and the Milwaukee News.

Sholes’ inventive genius was sparked by business needs. His first invention was for printing the address of subscribers into the margin of newspapers, an early form of what we now call “variable data printing.” He also worked with fellow inventors Samuel W. Soulé (machinist) and Carlos S. Glidden (attorney) on a machine for automatically numbering the pages of blank books and for sequentially numbering checks. Sholes obtained US Patents in 1864 for these inventions as well as one for a combination shoe brush-shoe scraper he invented along with C. F. J. Moller in 1866.

By the 1860s, many people were interested in developing, investing in or inventing a “Machine for Writing with Type or Printing on Paper or Other Substance” as one such system was called. The race was on to see who could come up with a viable, personal and portable alternative to the four hundred year old relief-printing process associated with Johannes Gutenberg.

Attempts had been made to conceptualize and even produce a typewriter going back to the 1700s. Englishman Henry Mill received a patent from Queen Anne in 1714 that called for “impressing or transcribing letters singly or progressively one after another, as in writing, where all writing whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print; …” However, as promising as it sounded, Mill left behind no drawings or record of any existing machine to go along with what was a breakthrough idea.

Sholes Proof of Concept Sholes proof of concept device (this model is a reconstruction, the original has been lost).

Sholes was inspired to solve the technical riddle of the typewriter after he saw the July 6, 1867 issue of Scientific American. The SA article reported an invention that had been exhibited at the London Society of Arts by John Pratt (later known as the Pterotype or “winged type”) of Centre, Alabama.

The SA editors captured the implications of what would become later Sholes’ invention: “Legal copying and writing and delivery of sermons and lectures, not to speak of letters and editorials, will undergo a revolution as remarkable as that effected in books by the invention of printing, and the weary process of learning penmanship in schools will be reduced to the acquirement of the art of writing one’s own signature and playing on the literary piano above described, or rather on its improved successors.”

Sholes vision for the typewriter was a natural extension of his numbering machine inventions of 1864. The proof of concept was a primitive system of wood frame, glass platen and brass bar attached to a Morse telegraph “key.” It produced the letter “w” over and over again by striking through a piece of carbon onto a sheet of paper against the glass.

After receiving an enthusiastic response from those who saw the concept, Sholes worked with Soulé, Glidden and the engineer Matthias Schwalbach throughout the summer and fall of 1867 to develop the first working typewriter. This machine used a keyboard that looked similar to that of a piano and it had a typewriter ribbon to transfer the image to paper. On June 23, 1868, Sholes, Glidden and Soulé received a patent for the design and it is recognized as the first practical typewriter.

07253_2003_001.tif Typewriter Patent drawing 6/23/1868 The front page of the October 1867 Sholes, Glidden and Soulé patent submission for “Improvements in Typewriting Machines”

The innovations represented by this invention are too numerous to explain in detail here. As the patent—filed on October 11, 1867—explains, “Its features are a better way of working the type-bars, of holding the paper on the carriage, of moving and regulating the movement of the carriage, of holding, applying and moving the inking ribbon, a self adjusting platen, and a rest or cushion for the type-bars to follow.” However, the inventors acknowledged the advances of others before them and filed the patent for “improvement in type-writing machines,” not the invention of the typewriter itself.

Mention should be made here of the QWERTY keyboard about which much has been written. The record shows that the keyboard design underwent an evolution beginning with a straightforward listing of numbers and letters of the alphabet. Upon testing and subsequent design improvements—coinciding with the collaboration of the inventors with investor James Densmore—it was seen that frequent jamming of the type bars was a barrier to practical use of the machine.

US207559.pdf The QWERTY keyboard as it was first presented in the Sholes patent of 1878

Sholes worked with the Densmore’s brother Amos, an educator, to make a statistical analysis of the most frequently used letter combinations. From there Sholes changed the keyboard design such that common letter pairs were separated by a “lag time” and the instance of type bar jams was reduced. The resultant QWERTY keyboard remains in use today even though these mechanical considerations are no longer present.

Something must also be said of Sholes’ character. While he was a man of significant talents and influence—Sholes left his position as editor of the Milwaukee Sentinel to accept an appointment by President Abraham Lincoln as Collector of the Port of Milwaukee—he was also a man of great principles and humility. An active opponent of slavery, Sholes was an abolitionist and founding member of Lincoln’s Republican Party. He supported the case of Joshua Glover that challenged the Fugitive Slave Act.

Historians universally recognize the magnanimity of Sholes and his preoccupation with progress over personal gain and recognition. It is a fact that he sold his invention to Remington (the Civil War gun manufacturer) for mass production and gladly accepted a one-time payment of $12,000 instead of a royalty contract.

Christopher Latham Sholes suffered throughout his life from persistent health issues that were likely the product of the harsh conditions of his upbringing. He died on February 17, 1890, after a long bout with tuberculosis, and was buried in an unmarked grave in Milwaukee’s Forest Home Cemetery. An effort was mounted in the early twentieth century to appropriately recognize Sholes and his grave was marked with a monument. It says “Dedicated by the young men and women of America in grateful memory of one who materially aided in the world’s progress.”

3-D printing: The next desktop revolution

I suspect there are more than a few readers who remember how printing and publishing changed dramatically in the 1980s as desktop computers and print-ready files displaced phototypesetters and camera-ready artwork. Many of us went from the hazards of darkroom chemistry to that of workstation ergonomics; I remember being unceremoniously lifted from the comfort of my paste-up boards, horizontal camera and film processor and dropped into the world of SyQuest disks, Apple system “bombs” and PostScript (infinite-loop) errors.

Steve Jobs Press Conference January 23 1985
Steve Jobs at the press conference where the first desktop publishing system was announced on January 23, 1985.

Actually, the birth of desktop publishing (a term coined by Paul Brainerd of Aldus Corporation) and its disruptive impact can be traced to a specific date. On January 23, 1985, at a press conference following an annual stockholder’s meeting of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs announced the first desktop publishing system. It consisted of the following component technologies:

  • Personal computer (Apple Macintosh)
  • Page layout software (Aldus PageMaker)
  • Laser printer (Canon/Apple LaserWriter)
  • Page description language (Adobe PostScript)

It is safe to say that few understood the meaning of what happened that day. For the first time, text and graphics were placed on a page simultaneously and imaged on paper as reproduction “copy” or as a final printed sheet. The breakthrough of desktop publishing was that it was possible for just about anyone—with a modest investment—to become a publisher. The full impact of desktop publishing would be realized over the next decade as it transformed several industries and was a significant element in the evolution of the World Wide Web.

Chris Anderson MakersWith the benefit of hindsight, Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail and former editor of Wired magazine) discusses the long-term implications of the desktop phenomenon in his book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. “Remember, at that time publishing used to mean manufacturing in every sense of the word, from the railways that brought huge rolls of paper and barrels of ink to the printing plant … Taking publishing out of the factories liberated it. But the real impact of this was not in paper, but in the idea of ‘publishing’ online. Once people were given the power of the press, they wanted to do more than print out newsletters. So, when the web arrived, ‘publishing’ became ‘posting’ and they could reach the world.”

Today Anderson believes that we are living through a similar paradigm shift. But this time it is in the world of physical objects and the making of things. Today’s Maker Movement—the design and manufacture of things by individuals instead of industrial corporations—is with personal computers, CAD software and desktop 3-D printers and other equipment like laser cutters and CNC machines.

Form 1 desktop 3-D printer
Desktop 3-D printers take geometric data from CAD software and fabricate objects out of liquid plastic or resin

Distinct from the desktop printers that produce 2-D black and white or full color images on sheets of paper, a 3-D printer uses electronic geometries and turns them into objects that you can pick up and hold in your hand. Desktop 3-D printers usually extrude molten plastic in layers of liquid or powder resin. They can typically put down plastic material in thin layers (.33 of a millimeter) in processes like fusion deposition modeling (FDM), stereo lithography (SLA) or selective laser sintering (SLS).

3-D printers are an “additive” manufacturing technology; they build up objects from nothing, layer by layer. This is distinct from older industrial techniques—like “subtractive” routers and mills—in which spinning raw material is cut or ground away to reveal the object. Although they are newer and undergoing rapid development, additive 3-D printers have the advantage of producing little or no waste in the production process.

3D Print Sales Chart
Market size by 3-D printing sector application in US$ million

According to a recent report by IDTechEx, large-scale 3-D printing surpassed revenues of $1 billion in 2012 and growth is expected to quadruple by 2025. Industries that are heavy users of 3-D printing technologies are medical and dental, automotive and aerospace. The promise of the 3-D print is that it opens up inexpensive variability and complexity to the mass manufacturing process. For example, 3-D print used in the manufacture of prosthetics and orthopedic implants makes possible mass customization based on patient CT or MRI scan data.

Some believe—including Chris Anderson—that the digital Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and Maker Movement are generating a much bigger market than that of the large-scale commercial applications. The aggregate value of the design and manufacture of entirely custom products in medium to small (or even single) quantities is potentially greater than the manufacture of mass consumer products where each item is identical.

This is a business concept that everyone in the printing industry is very familiar with. We have been dealing with the economics of the digital print for two decades and understand very well that the cost per unit of a digital print product (custom) versus conventional offset printing (mass production). The cost per unit in digital print is “flat,” i.e. it do not rise or fall based upon a decrease or increase in quantity or a change in complexity, whereas the cost of the setup (make-ready) of a traditional offset print project is amortized across the entire print run.

chrischarts.indd
The relationship between the cost per unit and the quantity of mass manufacturing (injection molding) versus digital fabrication (3-D printing).

Anderson explains it this way, “Digital fabrication inverts the economics of traditional manufacturing. In mass production, most of the costs are in up-front tooling, and the more complicated the product is and the more changes you make, the more it costs. But with digital fabrication, it’s the reverse: the things that are expensive in traditional manufacturing become free.”

We can rightfully question Chris Anderson’s assertion that digital desktop fabrication heralds the beginning of new industrial revolution on the magnitude of that which occurred in the nineteenth century. However, there is no doubting his commitment. Anderson recently left his position after more than ten years as editor of Wired magazine to become full-time CEO of the firm he founded called 3D Robotics that manufactures unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

As we think about the meaning of 3-D printing technology today, it is important to reflect back upon the desktop revolution of the 1980s. We should recall that many in the publishing industry viewed the nascent desktop system—inspired by Steve Jobs of Apple, Paul Brainerd of Aldus and Chuck Geschke and John Warnock of Adobe—as not measuring up to the professional requirements of the day. Many who initially dismissed desktop publishing as a fad and resisted the transition away from mechanical graphic arts technologies would later live to regret that perception.

The promise of 3-D printing is significant. Perhaps Chris Anderson will not be alone in the migration from the printing and publishing industries to that of digital fabrication, DIY manufacturing and the Maker Movement.

Eduard Hoffmann: 1892 – 1980

Eduard Hoffmann
Eduard Hoffmann

It is a fact of typographic history that the font Helvetica exists today because of Hamburgers … but not the food “Hamburgers.” Eduard Hoffmann, the creator of the ubiquitous typeface, knew the word “Hamburgers” contained the complete range of character attributes in the alphabet; he knew that from this one word the quality of a typeface design could be evaluated, that the features of its anatomy could be examined.

And so, early on in the design of the precursor to Helvetica—called Neue Haas Grotesk—Eduard Hoffmann of the Swiss-based Haas Type Foundry wrote to his designer and confident Max Miedinger, “But our first priority is the word ‘Hamburgers.’ It is the universal type founders’ word that contains all the varieties of letters.”

Helvetica is probably the most successful typeface in all of history. It is everywhere, all the time and there are reasons for this: Helvetica is neutral and easy to read; its different weights and styles effectively embody almost any meaning or message. Helvetica is plain but it is also modern and timeless.

Helvetica came about when typography and printing technology were moving from the metal casting, mechanical and letterpress era to the electronic phototypesetting, word processing, laser imaging and computer age. It rode atop this transformation and became the first truly international typeface. By the mid-1960s, Helvetica emerged as a global standard for public signage, corporate identity and communications.

Sampling of Helvetica Logos
A sampling of corporate identities that use Helvetica.

Regardless of one’s personal opinion of the esthetics and usefulness of Helvetica today, its creation and development—the people who developed it and how they developed it—is one of the most important accomplishments of twentieth century graphic arts.

Eduard Hoffmann was born on May 26, 1892 in Zurich, Switzerland. As a student, he studied technology and engineering in Zurich, Berlin and Munich with a specific interest in aviation. In 1917, the 25-year-old Hoffmann took a position under the direction of his uncle Max Krayer at Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) in Münchenstein, Switzerland and made a commitment to the profession of typography. In 1937, Eduard became co-manager of the company with Krayer, and after his uncle’s death in 1944, became sole manager where he remained until his retirement in 1965.

As early as 1950, Hoffmann made a decision to introduce a new sans serif typeface into the Swiss market that could compete with those coming from the other European countries. The origins of san serif typefaces date back to the late eighteenth century where it was used with an embossing technique to enable the blind to read. The first fully developed sans serif (also known as grotesque or grotesk) made its appearance in Germany around 1825 and a French type founder first used the term sans serif (without decorative extensions) in 1830.

The sans serif types that Hoffmann wanted to compete with originally became popular and successful in the late nineteenth century. This was true of Akzidenz Grotesk of the Berlin-based H. Berthold AG type foundry, for example, which was originally designed in 1896. But there were neo-grotesk faces that had since entered the market, Bauer’s Folio and Frutiger’s Univers for example, that threatened to eclipse Hoffmann’s venture.

In 1956, as grotesk font use was surging in Europe, Hoffmann thought the timing was right to attempt a specifically Swiss variety. He contacted Max Miedinger, who had been a salesman and type designer at the Haas Type Foundry for the previous ten years, and wrote “he was the only man to design a new typeface for Haas.”

Max Miedinger
Max Miedinger

Miedinger’s role in the process was decisive and many credit him more than Hoffmann for the creation of Helvetica. It is true that Miedinger made the original hand-drawn letters of the alphabet. But the esthetic component was only one side of the value that Miedinger brought to Haas. It was his in-depth knowledge and relationship with the customers of the type foundry that made Miedinger indispensible to the success of Neue Haas Grotesk and later Helvetica.

Miedinger had access to some of the most brilliant Swiss graphic artists as well as advertising representatives from major Swiss corporations—the chemical firm J.R. Geigy AG among them—and through a painstaking and collaborative development process headed up by Hoffmann, Neue Haas Grotesk took shape.

Throughout 1957 and 1958, the two men collaborated back and forth, fine-tuning each character. The record of the exchange between Hoffmann and Miedinger has been preserved and can be followed in detail in the book, Story of a Typeface: Helvetica forever. The book includes photographic reproductions of the letters the men wrote to each other as well as Hoffmann’s project notebook.

Eduard Hoffmanns Helvetica Notebook
A page from Eduard Hoffmann’s Helvetica notebook dated November 27, 1957.

Hoffmann knew that designing a great typeface was not only about the beauty and logical construction of each individual character, even though this was an important aspect. Each character had to fit together with all the other characters in the various combinations that make letters into words. There was also the technical question of how the typeface would look at different sizes and once it was printed with ink on paper.

As Hoffmann explained in 1957, “praxis has shown that a new typeface cannot be correctly and objectively evaluated until it is in printed form. But even then, it is quite curious to find that a letter might be very satisfactory in a word, while seemingly quite out of place in another context. This makes it necessary to consider its design anew, which usually leads to unavoidable compromises.”

Once they were satisfied with the basic letterforms and had designed enough weights and sizes—at that time, the Haas Type Foundry was punch cutting, engraving and typecasting by hand thousands upon thousands of individual characters in metal—the men took their product to market. With the help of some well-designed promotional brochures and an initial buzz at the Graphic 57 trade fair in Lausanne, Neue Haas Grotesk became a hit. By 1959, about ten percent of the printers in Switzerland were carrying it.

Haas Type Foundry Engraving
The engraving room at the Haas Type Foundry. Lintoype ceased the type casting operations at Haas in 1989.

The Haas Type Foundry was majority-owned by the German firm D. Stempel AG. In turn, Stempel was in a contract with the multinational Linotype Corporation for the production of machine manufactured metal type forms. In order to expand the appeal of Hoffmann and Miedinger’s typeface and to bring it to the world of mass production typography, especially in the US, Linotype’s marketing department pushed for Neue Haas Grotesk to be renamed.

Linotype initially suggested that it simply be named Helvetia (Latin for Switzerland). Hoffmann felt that, although it was distinctly a Swiss product, the typeface could not have the exact same name as the country. He came up with Helvetica, which means “The Swiss Typeface,” and all involved accepted the new name developed by its creator.

Into the 1960s, Helvetica gained spectacular popularity and was adopted as the “in-house typeface” of various international corporations, many of which still use it to this day. Commentary on the significance and social driving force behind the success of Helvetica has often referred to post-war economic expansion. There was a thirst in the 1950s within the creative community for visual clues that conveyed optimism about the future. Designers wanted an excessively modern look that helped to put the bad memories of the first half the twentieth century far behind. For many, Helvetica accomplished this goal.

In 1971, Eduard established a foundation with the aim of creating a museum dedicated to the printing industry. In 1980, in the former Gallician paper mill on the Rhine, the museum opened with Hoffmann’s collection of papers on the history of the Haas Type Foundry as one of its main attractions. Eduard Hoffmann died in Basel, Switzerland on September 17, 1980.