Hands On
MARK TWAIN: TECHNOLOGIST
HOW THE AUTHOR OF COULDN’T MAKE IT AS A VENTURE ANGEL.
AS A TEEN, HE EARNED HIS LIVING AS A printer in St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, and Cincinnati. He roamed the Mississippi as a steamboat pilot. He was a soldier for a couple of weeks, and a Nevada silver miner for a spell. He was a roughin’ it, hands-on, jack-of-all-trades.
Then his literary genius began to tell on him. Soon it was clear that he was much better at telling stories than he would ever be at making things.
Still, Samuel Clemens never shook off his romance with technology and invention. It’s in his books; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a time-travel yarn about a can-do techie who destroys medieval England through his ability to “make anything in the world.” Clemens himself was an ardent inventor: he created a perpetual-calendar watch-fob, a self-adjusting elastic strap to anchor his pants, and “Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrap Book.”
The scrapbook made some money because any book with Mark Twain’s name on it would sell. His other hobbyhorses perished through public indifference. This hurt Clemens’ pride a bit, but at least he could write about invention: he was ever the stout public defender of the lone inventive genius.
Clemens realized early on that inventors were mostly put-upon, solitary types, rarely properly rewarded. He also knew full well that the profit from Yankee ingenuity went mostly to investors and capitalists. He was an idealist, but he’d been around.
As one of the best-known celebrities of his era, Clemens had money to invest. He badly needed to do this. Like most best-selling writers, Clemens had an impressive income, but it was dangerously sporadic. Furthermore, Clemens was very much living the high life in New York in a grand mansion, built to his specs with all modern conveniences: six servants, private tutors for his daughters, and a needy host of guests, builders, plumbers, doctors, Tiffany decorators, and similar colorful encumbrances.
Even when Clemens was in top creative form, he was forced to hustle and make do, working the treadmill as a lone artist at the mercy of Gilded Age publishers. His lifelong dream was financial independence — a stable way to sit back, breathe easy, and thrive off investments.
Clemens was an ardent inventor: he created a perpetual-calendar watch-fob, a self-adjusting elastic strap to anchor his pants, and “Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrap Book.”
One obvious scheme was to start his own publishing house. He did this, and it was a quick success — not through his own writings, but from the best-selling deathbed memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. This business success emboldened him, but Clemens soon found that the hassles of small publishing were even more repulsive than the hassles of big publishing.
So his attention returned to his first craft: printing. Clemens was fascinated by the technical underpinnings of the printing industry. He was willing to take a flutter on many other forms of tech — food additives, bicycles, steam-pulleys, carpet-making machines, a cash register, a steam generator (the list did go on) — but he truly understood printing. He sensed, correctly, that the medium of print was long overdue for a technical revolution. Maybe he, Sam Clemens, could do to printing what Eli Whitney had done to cotton-picking.
The “Compositor” of James Paige, the Victorian robotic equivalent of a nimble-fingered, teenage Sam Clemens. The Charles Babbage Difference engine, also a conspicuous failure, was a “mere commonplace” compared to this “awful mechanical miracle.”
Photograph courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum
Clemens was a classic early-adopter, power-user type. He was a keen student of communication technologies. Patent fountain pens attracted his authorly interest. He was a pioneer user of the typewriter, and he used an early Edison cylinder as a dictation machine. Clemens’ mansion had one of the world’s first private telephones. Clemens even had electronic music piped in by telephone, through that legendary example of a dead medium, the Cahill Teleharmonium. Toward the end of his life, he was to champion a primitive European television.
Still, he’d grown up inside printing, and he’d been compositor, editor, publisher, journalist, author — he knew that business up and down. If he was ever to strike it rich as a venture capitalist, it made sense that printing would be his field. And in 1889, Clemens found his lone inventive genius: James Paige.
Since the days of Gutenberg, workaday printers had set up lead type by assembling pages one metal letter at a time. The Paige Compositor was a new machine that could hand-set type rapidly and automatically. This ingenious device had been patented in 1877, but the fat-headed printing industry had been too lazy to build it — too sluggish to make the greatest leap in typesetting in four centuries!
It remained to procure the funds to break this device from its visionary blueprints and actually build it, and Clemens, who’d caught wind of it through his publishing house, burned to see it take form.
The Compositor was a stunner. As Clemens wrote: “All the other inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle. Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton gins, sewing machines, Babbage calculators, Jacquard looms, perfecting presses, Arkwright’s frames — all mere toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone and far in the lead of human inventions.”
In 1889, Clemens signed a contract, gallantly giving Paige the ownership of his grand invention, but granting himself a hefty 500-dollar royalty for every such machine sold. Clemens struggled hard with the business model for his oncoming tech revolution, but no matter how he tried to figure it, it seemed impossible for him to avoid making millions. There were thousands of printing presses in the world. Every such machine with hand-assembled type was bound to become obsolete overnight. He had a huge, disruptive innovation that was striking at the root of the industry.
And Clemens was right: the hand-assembled press was doomed. And Paige was right, too: his amazingly elaborate invention, elegantly mimicking human movements with its 18,000 parts, could set type ten times faster than any human being could. The Paige Compositor was a kind of robot teenage Sam Clemens; it did just what Sam himself had once done, but on an industrial speed and scale.
Then, however, came the human element. James Paige was brilliant, a great talker, a mechanical genius, and a hacker perfectionist. Obsessed with his own brilliance, Paige couldn’t budge his machine out of the start-up garage and into the hurly-burly of commerce. With 18,000 different parts, there was always some nifty upgrade to be made to the Compositor. Then there was the allure of Paige’s moonlighting side projects, such as electrical generators. Paige couldn’t be bothered to field-test his machine under real-world conditions. His Compositor was always in beta and never quite ready to ship.
In the meantime, the Mergenthaler Linotype appeared on the publishing scene. The Linotype was a rugged, stupid, IBM-PC of a beast. The Linotype was 60 percent slower than the elegant Paige Compositor, but it was also the first to market. Furthermore, since the Linotype wasn’t quite so saturated with technical genius, it was easier to maintain, repair, and improve.
Ottmar Mergenthaler had never bothered to mimic any human movements. Trained as a watchmaker, not a printer, he’d invented an entirely new way to line up type mechanically. So, in the race toward a printing revolution, the Paige Compositor never left the starting gate.
Clemens had happily trifled with many tech toys over the years, but the Compositor was his demon. He sank $200,000 of his own wealth into his grand dream of reinventing print. But his steel darling was obsolete before it could hit the streets, and Clemens hit a cash-flow crunch that he could not escape.
He finally wrote: “I’ve shook the machine, and never wish to see it or hear it mentioned again. It is superb, it is perfect, it can do ten men’s work. It is worth billions, and when the pig-headed lunatic, its inventor, dies, it will instantly be capitalized and make the Clemens children rich.”
The Compositor was indeed superb, it was perfect, and it could do ten men’s work, but as an investment, the Paige Compositor was poison. It never made anyone rich. Superb perfection and the work of ten men were not at issue. Ease of maintenance, ruggedness, mass production, cheapness of operation, room for improvement — a machine that worked like a real machine — that was what the industry required. The Paige Compositor was as rare a thing as Clemens himself.
Crushed by debt, Clemens shut down his mansion, abandoned his crumbling publishing interests, gave up all hope for a settled, bourgeois existence, and fled with his family to Europe, for what turned out to be nine years of globe-trotting exile. Within
Clemens sank $200,000 into his grand dream of reinventing print.
four years, scraping frantically, he’d managed to pay off his creditors. Still, he never again wrote in the easy, funny, chatty way that he’d written before trying and failing to become a tech mogul.
Great wealth would always be denied him. Great fame would fall on him in heaps, and that would bury every other aspect of his efforts. He would never become Samuel Clemens, Venture Angel. To this day, he’s Mark Twain, Famous Author.
As for James Paige, “a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel” — he is entirely forgotten, except as the man who bankrupted Mark Twain.
The last models of the Paige Compositor were bought by the Mergenthaler company, picked up as curiosities. In 1964 — while their Linotype was still a going business — they donated the last surviving Compositor to Mark Twain’s house and museum. There, the genius machine still stands today, admired by tourists: gorgeous, unworked, and unworkable.
Bruce Sterling ([email protected]) is a science fiction writer and part-time design professor.