Christopher Sholes was the first person to patent the modern typewriter. He lived from February 14, 1819 to February, Henry Mill patented a similar machine in 1714 Henry Mill Christopher Sholes Sholess Typewriter One of the first typewriters. The first typewriter was designed in It was patented on June 23, 1868 Thomas Edison invented the first electric typewriter in 1872 Thomas A. Edison The typewriter was invented so that you could write things easier and faster Its basically made up of keys that when pushed stamp a letter, number, or punctuation into a carbon strip which transfers it onto a sheet of paper Sholess initial idea was to make a machine for putting down consecutive numbers, a friend convinced him to include letters and punctuation His design was the first to use the modern QWERTY keyboard Improved the speed with which a person could put ideas on paper Increased uniformity over handwritten documents Made communication easier There are still electric and manual typewriters in use today New versions of the typewriter are the word processing programs that computers use iter.html