In 1874, E. Remington and Sons began selling the Sholes & Glidden typewriter as the Remington No. 1. It was the first commercially successful typewriter, featuring a QWERTY keyboard layout that remains the standard today. While initially marketed to businesses, its availability marked the beginning of a new era in writing technology.

The commercial typewriter introduced the concept of mechanical writing to a broad audience, including the literary world. While many poets initially viewed it with suspicion, it eventually became an essential tool for the modern poet. The typewriter's ability to produce uniform, readable text changed how poetry was submitted to publishers and how it was read. It also enabled the emergence of 'typewriter poetry', where the mechanical nature of the machine became an integral part of the poem's meaning, as seen in the work of E.E. Cummings.