A strike of his printers led him to unsuccessful attempts to invent a typesetting machine.

He did succeed, however, in making, in collaboration with another printer, Samuel W.Soule, a numbering machine, and a friend, Carlos Glidden, to whom this ingenious contrivance was shown, suggested a machine to print letters.
The three friends decided to try.

None had studied the efforts of previous experimenters, and they made many errors which might have been avoided.

Gradually, however, the invention took form.

Patents were obtained in June, 1868, and again in July of the same year, but the machine was neither strong nor trustworthy.