ONE July day in 1867, an odd genius came into the Milwaukee telegraph office and asked the chief operator for a sheet of carbon paper.

Now, carbon paper was almost a curiosity then. About the only use that had been found for it was to make several copies quickly of newspaper dispatches as telegraphers took them from the wire and wrote them down in longhand.

The chief operator knew this visitor. He was Mr. Christopher Latham Sholes, a man already famous in Milwaukee for the many things he had done. At various times he had been a printer, a newspaper publisher, an editor, a member of the Wisconsin legislature, commissioner of public works, postmaster of Milwaukee. Now he was Uncle Sam's collector of customs in that city. He was an inventor, could tell a good story, make a clever pun, quote poetry, play a game of chess. He was tall and slender, somewhat frail, with long flowing hair, and clear bright eyes that had a far-away look. Modest, gentle, kindly, a stranger would not have thought him a fighter. Yet he would turn like a lion to defend right against might, and all the quicker if the right happened to be weak or getting the worst of it.

We want to know this man right at the beginning of our story, because he was the "Father of the Typewriter." And the telegraph operator, too, because he was present when the first real typewriter was begun. His name was Charles E. Weller, a backwoods lad who got little schooling, but was an enormous reader. Working first in a printing-office, he had later become a telegraph messenger, learned telegraphy and newspaper reporting, and was now studying shorthand with the ambition of becoming a court reporter.

What did Mr. Sholes want with a sheet of carbon paper? Young Weller was curious. He knew that Sholes had already invented a way to print the names and addresses of subscribers on the margins of newspapers for mailing, also a machine that would number dollar bills from No. 1 upward, or tickets, or print the page numbers in blank-books.

"Come to my office to-morrow about noon, Charley," said Mr. Sholes, as he went out, "and I'll show you something that may be interesting."

Next day young Weller was on hand. The inventor still edited a newspaper upstairs over the telegraph-office. Charley expected to see something new, and he did.

With some pieces of pine board, an old telegraph-key, a sheet of glass, and other odds and ends, Sholes had whittled out and tinkered together a little piece of mechanism which he was showing to some gentlemen. Taking his borrowed sheet of carbon paper and a thin sheet of white paper, he slipped them into his machine, against the piece of glass. Moving the paper slowly with one hand, he tapped the telegraph-key with the other. On the end of the telegraph-key was a letter "w" cut in brass.

Sholes's little device was a "writing-machine." It wrote only the one letter over and over, like this: WWWwwwwwww. But he said that with thirty or forty such keys, each having a letter or figure, he could make a machine that would write anything.

He had it clearly pictured in his mind, and gave a lot of technical details which Weller, who did n't know much about mechanics, found pretty knotty. All out of such a patched-up arrangement that wrote WWW WWWW!

Sholes was not the first inventor to conceive the idea of a machine that would write. As far back as the year 1714, an Englishman, Henry Mill, took out a patent for a machine which was said to "impress letters on paper as in writing." Nothing more is known about it, however; nor about an “embossing machine" invented in France in 1784; nor of the first American attempt at a writing-machine, called a "typographer,' patented by a Mr. Burt, all records of which were destroyed in a great fire in Washington in 1836.

A Frenchman named Progin patented a "typographic machine or pen," in which type-bars were used, a principle still found in the typewriter as we know it to-day. An American named Charles Thurber built a typewriter capable of actual work in 1843. It wrote very slowly, but Thurber added other useful principles-the carriage that holds the paper and slides along as the line is written, and the way of turning the paper when a line is finished.

Several early inventors tried to build a typewriter that would raise letters on the

paper, to be read by the blind. One of them, a Frenchman, Pierre Foucald, received a gold medal for such a machine in 1850-he was blind himself. Sympathy with the blind was the idea with which nearly every typewriter inventor started. Blind people were cut off from ordinary reading and writing, yet needed them so much! Alfred E. Beach, an odd genius, remembered now as the first editor of "The Scientific American," also wanted to help the blind, so between 1847 and 1856, he built several writing-machines. They were mostly made of wood and as big as a bushel basket, but had ideas that are still used. His firm took out hundreds of patents for inventors, and as that involved a great deal of writing, there was probably no larger staff of longhand copyists in New York. Before Beach got very far, he saw that the real place for his writing-machine was in business offices, doing just such work as copying patent papers.

ords and legal papers and letters had to be written and copied as the world's business grew, that pen-and-ink copyists could not keep pace with the work much longer. A successful typewriter meant a revolution almost as great as that caused by the invention of printing in the world of books.

The real typewriter, which had Sholes for its father, had several uncles as well. One of them was Carlos S. Glidden, whom Sholes had told about his idea for a device for printing numbers, and which made such a deep impression on Glidden that he helped Sholes work it out. That gave Glidden another idea.

By this time, shortly before Sholes wrote his "WWW's," there was keen rivalry between English and American writing-machine inventors-a race to see which country would build the first real typewriter. promising machine was invented in London in 1866-but by an American living there, John Pratt.

A

This had the whole alphabet on one plate. When its "A" key was pressed, that letter swung in place, a hammer hit it through the paper, and wrote the letter. It was the best device up to that time, and everybody talked about it. Some people said the time would come and soon, too-when a reporter with a writing-machine would take down speeches as fast as they were spoken. Why not, with the railroad, steamboat, sewing-machine, electric telegraph, revolving printing-press, and like wonders all around them? But other folks laughed at the idea of a machine that would write faster or better than the skilled penmen in the business offices of that day.

In July, 1867, Alfred Beach wrote an article for his "Scientific American," showing the great value of a practical typewriter, and foretold what it would do. He spoke as a typewriter inventor himself. So many rec

"If you can write numbers, why not letters?" he reasoned.

Sholes did n't seem to see the point, so Glidden showed him the article about the typewriter in "The Scientific American." Sholes read it over, and admitted that the idea was practical. But not Pratt's machine, about which so much had been said.

"It is too complicated," he objected, "and badly made. I know I can build something better."

"Why not do it together?" suggested Glidden, and Sholes agreed. They took in a third person, Samuel W. Soule, who was something of an inventor too, but more useful as a practical machinist. He could build a thing quickly, after Sholes made the idea clear, and often improved upon it. In fact, he suggested something found to-day in nearly every typewriter-the principle of having all the type strike in the same spot, called "converging type-bars."

Glidden and Soule were the men to whom Sholes was showing his first one-letter model when Charley Weller saw it. This model was built only a week after Sholes read Alfred Beach's article. He had in the meantime studied previous typewriters to learn their good points and avoid the bad ones. He had so clear an idea of what he wanted to do that the three partners started at once to build the first typewriter in a little Milwaukee machine-shop known as "Kleinsteuber's."

Charley Weller was right on their heels.