The first typewriter to be commercially successful was invented in 1868 by Americans Christopher Latham Sholes, Frank Haven Hall, Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soule in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. It was described as looking "something like a cross between a piano and a kitchen table." t was put into production by E. Remington and Sons (then famous as a manufacturer of sewing machines) Remington began production of its first typewriter on March 1, 1873, in New York. It had a QWERTY keyboard layout, which because of the machine's success, was slowly adopted by other typewriter manufacturers. As with most other early typewriters, because the typebars strike upwards, the typist could not see the characters as they were typed.

The QUERTY typewriter was, in part, designed to make sure that commonly-struck keys were not close together, or the hammers might hit one another and get stuck.