I took an evening course once that proved to be the best investment I ever made. Pictured here is the same model of typewriter that I used for that course. Thank you, Charles Latham Sholes!

What was the single best investment you ever made, the one that reaped you the highest return?

Mine involved a mere ten dollars. It continues to pay off, fifty-six years after I made it in 1970. Nothing else even comes close. While most of you are in some way celebrating Valentine’s Day today, I’m thinking of a man born on February 14, 1819, in Mooresburg, Pennsylvania. His name? Christopher Latham Sholes. He invented the modern version of the venerable typewriter with the QWERTY keyboard. The course that taught me how to use it remains to this day my best investment ever.

Back in the late 1960s, Beaver Falls High School (30 miles north of Pittsburgh) offered a typing class, as I suspect most high schools did at the time. I don’t remember why I didn’t sign up for it, but I clearly recall that I was determined to learn how to use the machine. I knew I would soon be in college, where pecking out papers one forefinger at a time just wouldn’t do.

A newspaper ad from the local community college caught my attention. “Learn to Type in Just 10 Weeks.” The price? A whopping $10. That’s equivalent to about $85 in today’s depreciating Federal Reserve notes. I signed up. You had to bring your own typewriter to class, and the heavy clunker I lugged was vintage Calvin Coolidge. The typewriter in the above photo, incidentally, is the very model on which I learned to type.

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