Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman was born in 1911 in Fort Collins, Colorado. He received a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, and while studying as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University in Oxford, England recieved an additional bachelor's degree and master's degree. Hinman recieved his doctorate from the University of Virginia in 1941 while studying as a DuPont research fellow.

Hinman served in the U.S. Navy during World War II, rising to the rank of Commodore. His experience in Naval intelligence led to him developing the Hinman Collating Machine, or Hinman Collator to facilitate the comparison of pairs of documents for differences in their texts. Hinman successfully used the collator to create a facsimile of William Shakespeare's First Folio, the first collection of Shakespeare's plays published, 7 years after his death. This facsimile, The Norton Facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare, was published in 1968 by W.W. Norton and Company.

His experience with collating the various First Folios at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. led to Hinman publishing The Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare, a book detailing his examination of the First Folios. Hinman was also recognized as a Guggenheim fellow and a Bollingen research fellow for his work in the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Hinman served as an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University before joining the University of Kansas (KU) as a professor in 1960. KU recognized Hinman as a Distinguished Professor before his passing.

Charlton Hinman died March 16, 1977.

[Information pulled from Hinman's 1977 obituaries in the The Washington Post and The New York Times.]