The first typewriter to be commercially successful…

Sholes, born in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania, had moved to nearby Danville as a teenager, where he had worked as an apprentice to a printer.

After completing his apprenticeship, Sholes had moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1837 and become a newspaper publisher and politician, serving in the Wisconsin State Senate 1848-1849, 1856–1857, and the Wisconsin State Assembly 1852-1853.

He had been instrumental in the successful movement to abolish capital punishment in Wisconsin: his newspaper, The Kenosha Telegraph, had reported on the trial of John McCaffary in 1851, and then in 1853 he had led the campaign in the Wisconsin State Assembly.

He is the younger brother of Charles Sholes (1816–1867), a newspaper publisher and politician who had served in both houses of the Wisconsin State Legislature and as mayor of Kenosha, Wisconsin.

In 1845, while Sholes was working as editor of the Southport Telegraph, a small newspaper in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he had heard about the alleged discovery of the Voree Record, a set of three minuscule brass plates unearthed by James J. Strang, a would-be successor to the murdered Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, Jr.. Strang, asserting that this proved that he was a true prophet of God, had invited the public to call upon him and see the plates for themselves.

Sholes accordingly had visited Strang, examined his "Voree Record," and wrote an article about their meeting.

He indicated that, while he could not accept Strang's plates or his prophetic claims, Strang himself seemed to be "honest and earnest" and his disciples were "among the most honest and intelligent men in the neighborhood."

As for the "record" itself, Sholes indicated that he was "content to have no opinion about it." (Fitzpatrick, Doyle, The King Strang Story (National Heritage, 1970), pp. 36-37.)

Sholes had moved to Milwaukee and became the editor of a newspaper.

Following a strike by compositors at his printing press, he had attempted building a machine for typesetting, but after its failure he had quickly abandoned the idea.

He will arrive at the typewriter through a different route.

His initial goal is to create a machine to number pages of a book, tickets, and so on.

He begins work on this at Kleinsteubers machine shop in Milwaukee, together with a fellow printer Samuel W. Soule, and they patent a numbering machine on November 13, 1866.

Sholes and Soule show their machine to Carlos Glidden, a lawyer and amateur inventor at the machine shop working on a mechanical plow, who wonders if the machine can be made to produce letters and words as well.