On June 23, 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, were awarded a patent for their typewriting machine. This was the first practical typewriter, and Sholes would continue to improve it, eventually signing a contract with E. Remington and Sons in 1873. The typewriter was a revolutionary machine that would transform writing, business, and society.

The typewriter mechanized the act of writing, making it faster and producing a standardized, legible text. This had a profound impact on literature, enabling writers to produce work more efficiently and making the process of revision more tactile. Poets like E.E. Cummings were fascinated by the typewriter's potential, using its mechanical constraints to create visual poetry that played with spacing and typography, fundamentally changing the relationship between the poet, the page, and the printed word.