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Gravel Sholes Park? Traditional Cache

Hidden : 2/1/2010
Difficulty:
2 out of 5
Terrain:
2 out of 5

Size: Size:   small (small)

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Geocache Description:

You are looking for a small camouflaged pill bottle.The parkway is closed 10pm until dawn. Parking only on one side of the parkway. *********Please hide cache exactly as you found it********* Thanks to Brian Russart at Milwaukee County Parks for approval of this cache.Congratulations to Team Kracker and Puzzler, for first to find!

......................................................................................... So what does your computer keyboard and this little park have in common? This cache is located in Gravel Sholes Park. The park was named in memory of Christopher Latham Sholes, the “Father of the Typewriter.“ Mr. Sholes was born in Columbia County Pennsylvania in 1819. At an early age he apprenticed as a printer. At the age of eighteen he joined his brother in a Green Bay Wisconsin printing business. At age nineteen he compiled the house journal of the Wisconsin Territorial Legislature and set it to print. At the age of twenty, Sholes became editor of the “Wisconsin Inquirer” in Madison Wisconsin and soon was editor of the “Kenosha Telegraph“. Sholes also served in the state senate and legislature. He became Milwaukee postmaster, commissioner of public works and later on, editor of the “Milwaukee Sentinel”. In 1866 he accepted President Lincoln’s appointment as collector of customs in Milwaukee. With this less demanding position he had the opportunity to work on his idea of a consecutive numbering machine for bank notes and blank pages. A fellow inventor and mechanic, Carlos Glidden urged Sholes to modify his machine from page numbering to a letter printing machine. Glidden had read an account of attempts to build such a machine. “From that moment on, Sholes devoted his whole time and thought to the idea which has given to the world the typewriter”. Sholes hard work and perseverance paid off as he developed the first practical typewriter. In 1873 Sholes sold his patent rights to the Remington Arms Co. for the sum of $12,000. Remington had the equipment and skills to develop and market the Remington Typewriter. This machine was sluggish and had problems with jamming, Sholes was enlisted to solve the problem. To rectify these issues, he obtained a list of the most commonly used letters in the English language. He rearranged the keyboard from the original alphabetic order to one in which the most often used letter keys were spread apart. The typists of the time used the hunt and peck method, this new key arrangement slowed them enough to allow the levers time to fall back in place before the next one came up. This new arrangement was named the Sholes QWERTY keyboard and is still the one we use today. Fifty years after his invention was given to the world, a plot of land was named to honor the memory of Christopher Latham Sholes. Finally, none of sources I researched or people I contacted at Milwaukee County parks had any idea how the “Gravel” name came to be, perhaps from the natural stream bed of the now channeled creek you see to the west of the cache area. * Source, History of Milwaukee, city and county, Vol. 1, Bruce, William George 1922
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Additional Hints (Decrypt)

Vg'f abg va gurer nalzber, ghea nebhaq naq ybbx hc.

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)