The typewriter was not the first evidence of Sholes's inventive genius. Years before he had been the first to conceive of the method of addressing newspapers by printing the names of subscribers on the margin. His more recent work on the machine for paging blank books brings us to the beginning of the typewriter story. But all else is now obscured by the memory of his crowning achievement, the invention of the writing machine. What was the influence which caused these three men, Sholes, Soulé and Glidden, to drop the inventions on which they had been working and to pool their interests in a new and far greater undertaking? According to one story, the idea arose out of a chance remark of Glidden's, who had become interested in Sholes's paging machine and one day said, "Why cannot such a machine be made that will write letters and words and not figures only?" Nothing further was said or done at the time, but in the summer of the following year (1867) a copy of the Scientific American, which quoted an article from a London technical journal, fell into the hands of Glidden. It described a machine called the "Pterotype," invented by John Pratt, which was designed to do just what Glidden had suggested. This invention had inspired an editorial in the same issue of the paper which pointed out the great benefit to mankind which such a machine would confer, as well as the fortune that awaited the successful inventor. Glidden immediately brought this article to the attention of Sholes, and it appealed so strongly to his imagination that he decided to see what could be done. General William G. LeDue, whose own interest in the invention of a typewriter dated back to 1850, and who subsequently was the first man to introduce the machine into the Government service at Washington, tells how, in 1867, he visited Milwaukee and found Sholes, together with Glidden, at work on the book-paging machine, and suggested to them the idea of a typewriter.