It started with a problem.
Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soulé developed a practical typewriter in Milwaukee and received a U.S. patent in 1868. The device was licensed to the arms manufacturer E. Remington and Sons, which manufactured and sold the Sholes and Glidden Type Writer commercially from 1874. Early adoption included legal offices, newspapers, and government agencies. The Smithsonian National Museum of American History holds early typewriters and documents their commercial introduction. The QWERTY keyboard layout, developed by Sholes, was designed to reduce mechanical jams by separating frequently used letter combinations.
Historical sources below ↓Then something changed.
The typewriter changed business communications in two connected ways. First, it standardized the appearance of documents: a typed letter looked the same whether produced by a careful or careless hand. Second, it enabled a new kind of office worker — the typist, predominantly women, who became central to the function of large organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The typewriter made legible the separation between the person who composed a document and the person who produced it. This separation created the role of secretary and the organizational expectation that correspondence could be reliably produced, filed, and retrieved.
What a builder can learn.
Our interpretation: the typewriter made documents independent of their creator's handwriting, which made documents more trustworthy as records. The equivalent today is any standardization of format or template that makes a document readable and searchable regardless of who created it. A business that requires key documents — proposals, reports, handoff notes — to follow a consistent format is not imposing bureaucracy for its own sake; it is ensuring that the document functions as a record for any future reader.
A door still open.
A hypothesis worth testing: if a small business introduced a simple template for one category of recurring document — client handover notes, project kickoff summaries, post-meeting action items — would the quality and completeness of those documents improve enough to reduce follow-up clarification questions within a month?
Which document does your business produce repeatedly where the quality and completeness depend almost entirely on who created it that day?
Follow the evidence.
History is sourced below. Business lessons are editorial interpretations; future possibilities are questions to test, not predictions.
Prepared from primary-source histories. First edition: 25 Sept 2026.