In 1850 all writing was done with pencil or pen and ink Offices employed scribes to keep records, and the only practical way to make a copy of a document was to rewrite it longhand For individuals, this practice was rarely a hardship For business, state and federal governments, and the courts, copy work was tedious and timeconsuming.
As early as 1829 there were working models of awkward typing machines developed by inventors in the printing business, but they were more significant as curiosities than as working tools The modern typewriter was not introduced until 1867, when Christopher Latham Sholes, a printer, Carlos Glidden, a lawyer, and Samuel Soule, a draftsman and engineer, introduced a refinement of a machine that Sholes had been using in his print shop to print page numbers Their typewriter, which featured a keyboard with the familiar "qwerty" arrangement of letters...