The reader may have realized that by the beginning of 1891 Mark Twain's
finances were in a critical condition. The publishing business had
managed to weather along. It was still profitable, and could have been
made much more so if the capital necessary to its growth had not been
continuously and relentlessly absorbed by that gigantic vampire of
inventions--that remorseless Frankenstein monster--the machine.
The beginning of this vast tragedy (for it was no less than that) dated
as far back as 1880, when Clemens one day had taken a minor and purely
speculative interest in patent rights, which was to do away with setting
type by hand. In some memoranda which he made more than ten years later,
when the catastrophe was still a little longer postponed, he gave some
account of the matter.
This episode has now spread itself over more than one-fifth of my
life, a considerable stretch of time, as I am now 55 years old.
Ten or eleven years ago Dwight Buell, a jeweler, called at our house
and was shown up to the billiard-room-which was my study; and the
game got more study than the other sciences. He wanted me to take
some stock in a type-setting machine. He said it was at the Colt's
Arms factory, and was about finished. I took $2,000 of the stock.
I was always taking little chances like that, and almost always
losing by it, too. Some time afterward I was invited to go down to
the factory and see the machine. I went, promising myself nothing,
for I knew all about type-setting by practical experience, and held
the settled and solidified opinion that a successful type-setting
machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot
be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think or
retire defeated. So, the performance I witnessed did most
thoroughly amaze me. Here was a machine that was really setting
type, and doing it with swiftness and accuracy, too. Moreover, it
was distributing its case at the same time. The distribution was
automatic; the machine fed itself from a galley of dead matter and
without human help or suggestion, for it began its work of its own
accord when the type channels needed filling, and stopped of its own
accord when they were full enough. The machine was almost a
complete compositor; it lacked but one feature--it did not “justify”
the lines. This was done by the operator's assistant.
I saw the operator set at the rate of 3,000 ems an hour, which,
counting distribution, was but little short of four casemen's work.
William Hamersley was there. He said he was already a considerable
owner, and was going to take as much more of the stock as he could
afford. Wherefore, I set down my name for an additional $3,000. It
is here that the music begins.
It was the so-called Farnham machine that he saw, invented by James W.
Paige, and if they had placed it on the market then, without waiting
for the inventor to devise improvements, the story might have been
a different one. But Paige was never content short of absolute
perfection--a machine that was not only partly human, but entirely
so. Clemens' used to say later that the Paige type-setter would do
everything that a human being could do except drink and swear and go
on a strike. He might properly have omitted the last item, but of that
later. Paige was a small, bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed man, with
a crystal-clear mind, but a dreamer and a visionary. Clemens says
of him: “He is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime
creations are written in steel.”
It is easy to see now that Mark Twain and Paige did not make a good
business combination. When Paige declared that, wonderful as the machine
was, he could do vastly greater things with it, make it worth many more
and much larger fortunes by adding this attachment and that, Clemens
was just the man to enter into his dreams and to furnish the money to
realize them. Paige did not require much money at first, and on the
capital already invested he tinkered along with his improvements for
something like four or five years; Hamersley and Clemens meantime
capitalizing the company and getting ready to place the perfected
invention on the market. By the time the Grant episode had ended Clemens
had no reason to believe but that incalculable wealth lay just ahead,
when the newspapers should be apprised of the fact that their types were
no longer to be set by hand. Several contracts had been made with Paige,
and several new attachments had been added to the machine. It seemed to
require only one thing more, the justifier, which would save the labor
of the extra man. Paige could be satisfied with nothing short of that,
even though the extra man's wage was unimportant. He must have his
machine do it all, and meantime five precious years had slipped away.
Clemens, in his memoranda, says:
End of 1885. Paige arrives at my house unheralded. I had seen
little or nothing of him for a year or two. He said:
“What will you complete the machine for?”
“What will it cost?”
“Twenty thousand dollars; certainly not over $30,000.”
“What will you give?”
“I'll give you half.”
Clemens was “flush” at this time. His reading tour with Cable, the great
sale of Huck Finn, the prospect of the Grant book, were rosy realities.
He said:
“I'll do it, but the limit must be $30,000.”
They agreed to allow Hamersley a tenth interest for the money he had
already invested and for legal advice.
Hamersley consented readily enough, and when in February, 1886, the new
contract was drawn they believed themselves heir to the millions of the
Fourth Estate.
By this time F. G. Whitmore had come into Clemens's business affairs,
and he did not altogether approve of the new contract. Among other
things, it required that Clemens should not only complete the machine,
but promote it, capitalize it commercially. Whitmore said:
“Mr. Clemens, that clause can bankrupt you.”
Clemens answered: “Never mind that, Whitmore; I've considered that. I
can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if I can
get a perfect machine.”
He immediately began to calculate the number of millions he would be
worth presently when the machine was completed and announced to the
waiting world. He covered pages with figures that never ran short of
millions, and frequently approached the billion mark. Colonel Sellers in
his happiest moments never dreamed more lavishly. He obtained a list of
all the newspapers in the United States and in Europe, and he counted up
the machines that would be required by each. To his nephew, Sam Moffett,
visiting him one day, he declared that it would take ten men to count
the profits from the typesetter. He realized clearly enough that a
machine which would set and distribute type and do the work of half a
dozen men or more would revolutionize type composition. The fact that
other inventors besides Paige were working quite as diligently and
perhaps toward more simple conclusions did not disturb him. Rumors
came of the Rogers machine and the Thorne machine and the Mergenthaler
linotype, but Mark Twain only smiled. When the promoters of the
Mergenthaler offered to exchange half their interests for a half
interest in the Paige patent, to obtain thereby a wider insurance of
success, it only confirmed his trust, and he let the golden opportunity
go by.
Clemens thinks the thirty thousand dollars lasted about a year. Then
Paige confessed that the machine was still incomplete, but he said that
four thousand dollars more would finish it, and that with ten thousand
dollars he could finish it and give a big exhibition in New York. He had
discarded the old machine altogether, it seems, and at Pratt & Whitney's
shops was building a new one from the ground up--a machine of twenty
thousand minutely exact parts, each of which must be made by expert hand
workmanship after elaborate drawings and patterns even more expensive.
It was an undertaking for a millionaire.
Paige offered to borrow from Clemens the amount needed, offering the
machine as security. Clemens supplied the four thousand dollars, and
continued to advance money from time to time at the rate of three
to four thousand dollars a month, until he had something like eighty
thousand dollars invested, with the machine still unfinished. This would
be early in 1888, by which time other machines had reached a state of
completion and were being placed on the market. The Mergenthaler, in
particular, was attracting wide attention. Paige laughed at it, and
Clemens, too, regarded it as a joke. The moment their machine was
complete all other machines would disappear. Even the fact that the
Tribune had ordered twenty-three of the linotypes, and other journals
were only waiting to see the paper in its new dress before ordering,
did not disturb them. Those linotypes would all go into the scrap-heap
presently. It was too bad people would waste their money so. In January,
1888, Paige promised that the machine would be done by the 1st of April.
On the 1st of April he promised it for September, but in October he
acknowledged there were still eighty-five days' work to be done on it.
In November Clemens wrote to Orion:
The machine is apparently almost done--but I take no privileges on that
account; it must be done before I spend a cent that can be avoided. I
have kept this family on very short commons for two years and they must
go on scrimping until the machine is finished, no matter how long that
may be.
By the end of '88 the income from the books and the business and Mrs.
Clemens's Elmira investments no longer satisfied the demands of the
type-setter, in addition to the household expense, reduced though
the latter was; and Clemens began by selling and hypothecating his
marketable securities. The whole household interest by this time
centered in the machine. What the Tennessee land had been to John and
Jane Clemens and their children, the machine had now become to Samuel
Clemens and his family. “When the machine is finished everything will be
all right again” afforded the comfort of that long-ago sentence, “When
the Tennessee land is sold.”
They would have everything they wanted then. Mrs. Clemens planned
benefactions, as was her wont. Once she said to her sister:
“How strange it will seem to have unlimited means, to be able to do
whatever you want to do, to give whatever you want to give without
counting the cost.”
Straight along through another year the three thousand dollars and more
a month continued, and then on the 5th of January, 1889, there came what
seemed the end--the machine and justifier were complete! In his notebook
on that day Mark Twain set down this memorandum: