ABSTRACT
Whether or not Christopher Latham Sholes, often cited as the inventor of the typewriter, actually said this, many other writers since Sholes have said much the same thing. And they are all wrong-on all counts. Sholes was not the first person to invent the typewriter; scores of people before him had devised writing machines. Sholes’s renown comes more from the fact that his machine was sold to the Remington Company, the first mass manufacturer of typewriters in the United States. Nor did the typewriter cause the employment of women in clerical work in the United States; women were drawn into the office because of the mushrooming demand for clerical labor occasioned by the expansion and consolidation of the capitalist economy at the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, those very structural changes in capitalism underlay the successful manufacture of the typewriter, for not until accounting, correspondence and record keeping increased along with governments and firms did the usefulness of a writing machine become self-evident.
