Born in Mooresburg, in Montour County, Pennsylvania, Sholes moved to nearby Danville and worked there as an apprentice to a printer.

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

During this time, he 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 Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement.

Further inspiration came in July 1867, when Sholes came across a short note in Scientific American[15] describing the "Pterotype", a prototype typewriter that had been invented by John Pratt.

It did not contain keys for the numerals 0 or 1 because the letters O and I were deemed sufficient: The first row was made of ivory and the second of ebony, the rest of the framework was wooden.

Despite the evident prior art by Pratt, it was in this same form that Sholes, Glidden and Soule were granted patents for their invention on June 23, 1868[16] and July 14.

When Densmore eventually examined the machine in March 1867, he declared that it was good for nothing in its current form, and urged them to start improving it.

Discouraged, Soule and Glidden left the project, leaving Sholes and Densmore in sole possession of the patent.

The most important of them was James O. Clephane of Washington D.C., who tried the instruments as no one else had tried them, subjecting them to such unsparing tests that he destroyed them, one after another, as fast as they could be made and sent to him.

Sholes sold his half for $12,000, while Densmore, still a stronger believer in the machine, insisted on a royalty, which would eventually fetch him $1.5 million.

[19] James Densmore had suggested splitting up commonly used letter combinations in order to solve a jamming problem caused by the slow method of recovering from a keystroke: weights, not springs, returned all parts to the "rest" position.

This concept was later refined by Sholes and the resulting QWERTY layout is still used today on both typewriters and English language computer keyboards, although the jamming problem no longer exists.