Lillian Sholes, the daughter of Christopher Sholes writing on one of his experimental machines. "The First Typist." 1872. Christopher Latham Sholes (1819-1890) was an American inventor often referred to as the father of the typewriter. Typewriters had been invented as early as 1714 and reinvented in various forms throughout the 1800s, but it was to be Sholes who invented the first one to be commercially successful. He invented the first practical modern typewriter in 1866, with the financial and technical support of his business partners Samuel Soule and Carlos Glidden. Five years, dozens of experiments, and two patents later, Sholes and his associates produced an improved model similar to today's typewriters. The Sholes typewriter had a type-bar system and the universal keyboard was the machine's novelty, however, the keys jammed easily. To solve the jamming problem, another business associate, James Densmore, suggested splitting up keys for letters commonly used together to slow down typing. This became today's standard "QWERTY" keyboard.