Saturday, January 5, 1889-12.20 P.M. At this moment I have seen a
line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery! This is the
first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has
ever been done. Present:
J. W. Paige, the inventor;
Charles Davis, | Mathematical assistants
Earll | & mechanical
Graham | experts
Bates, foreman, and S. L. Clemens.
This record is made immediately after the prodigious event.
Two days later he made another note:
Monday, January 7--4.45 P.m. The first proper name ever set by this
new keyboard was William Shakspeare. I set it at the above hour; &
I perceive, now that I see the name written, that I either
misspelled it then or I've misspelled it now.
The space-bar did its duty by the electric connections & steam &
separated the two words preparatory to the reception of the space.
It seemed to him that his troubles were at an end. He wrote overflowing
letters, such as long ago he had written about his first mining claims,
to Orion and to other members of the family and to friends in America
and Europe. One of these letters, written to George Standring, a London
printer and publisher, also an author, will serve as an example.
The machine is finished! An hour and forty minutes ago a line of
movable type was spaced and justified by machinery for the first
time in the history of the world. And I was there to see.
That was the final function. I had before seen the machine set
type, automatically, and distribute type, and automatically
distribute its eleven different thicknesses of spaces. So now I
have seen the machine, operated by one individual, do the whole
thing, and do it a deal better than any man at the case can do it.
This is by far and away the most marvelous invention ever contrived
by man. And it is not a thing of rags and patches; it is made of
massive steel, and will last a century.
She will do the work of six men, and do it better than any six men
that ever stood at a case.
The death-warrant of all other type-setting machines in this world
was signed at 12.20 this afternoon, when that first line was shot
through this machine and came out perfectly spaced and justified.
And automatically, mind you.
There was a speck of invisible dirt on one of those nonpareil types.
Well, the machine allowed for that by inserting of its own accord a
space which was the 5-1,000 of an inch thinner than it would have
used if the dirt had been absent. But when I send you the details
you will see that that's nothing for this machine to do; you'll see
that it knows more and has got more brains than all the printers in
the world put together.
His letter to Orion was more technical, also more jubilant. At the end
he said:
All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical
birth--the first justification of a line of movable type by
machinery--& also set down the hour and the minute. Nobody had
drank anything, & yet everybody seemed drunk. Well-dizzy,
stupefied, stunned.
All the other wonderful 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,
all mere toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone and
far in the land of human inventions.
In one paragraph of Orion's letter he refers to the machine as a
“cunning devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived.” That was
a profound truth, though not as he intended it. That creation of
James Paige's brain reflected all the ingenuity and elusiveness of
its creator, and added something on its own account. It was discovered
presently that it had a habit of breaking the types. Paige said it was
a trifling thing: he could fix it, but it meant taking down the machine,
and that deadly expense of three thousand or four thousand dollars a
month for the band of workmen and experts in Pratt & Whitney's machine
shops did not cease. In February the machine was again setting and
justifying type “to a hair,” and Whitmore's son, Fred, was running it
at a rate of six thousand ems an hour, a rate of composition hitherto
unknown in the history of the world. His speed was increased to eight
thousand ems an hour by the end of the year, and the machine was
believed to have a capacity of eleven thousand. No type-setter invented
to this day could match it for accuracy and precision when it was in
perfect order, but its point of perfection was apparently a vanishing
point. It would be just reached, when it would suddenly disappear,
and Paige would discover other needed corrections. Once, when it was
apparently complete as to every detail; and running like a human thing,
with such important customers as the New York Herald and other great
papers ready to place their orders, Paige suddenly discovered that it
required some kind of an air-blast, and it was all taken down again and
the air-blast, which required months to invent and perfect, was added.
But what is the use of remembering all these bitter details? The steady
expense went on through another year, apparently increasing instead of
diminishing, until, by the beginning of 1890, Clemens was finding
it almost impossible to raise funds to continue the work. Still he
struggled on. It was the old mining fascination--“a foot farther into
the ledge and we shall strike the vein of gold.”
He sent for Joe Goodman to come and help him organize a capital-stock
company, in which Senator Jones and John Mackay, old Comstock friends,
were to be represented. He never for a moment lost faith in the final
outcome, and he believed that if they could build their own factory
the delays and imperfections of construction would be avoided. Pratt &
Whitney had been obliged to make all the parts by hand. With their own
factory the new company would have vast and perfect machinery dedicated
entirely to the production of type-setters.
Nothing short of two million dollars capitalization was considered,
and Goodman made at least three trips from California to the East and
labored with Jones and Mackay all that winter and at intervals during
the following year, through which that “cunning devil,” the machine,
consumed its monthly four thousand dollars--money that was the final
gleanings and sweepings of every nook and corner of the strong-box and
bank-account and savings of the Clemens family resources. With all of
Mark Twain's fame and honors his life at this period was far from an
enviable one. It was, in fact, a fevered delirium, often a veritable
nightmare.
Reporters who approached him for interviews, little guessing what he was
passing through, reported that Mark Twain's success in life had made him
crusty and sour.
Goodman remembers that when they were in Washington, conferring with
Jones, and had rooms at the Arlington, opening together, often in the
night he would awaken to see a light burning in the next room and to
hear Mark Twain's voice calling:
“Joe, are you awake?”
“Yes, Mark, what is it?”
“Oh, nothing, only I can't sleep. Won't you talk awhile? I know it's
wrong to disturb you, but I am so d--d miserable that I can't help it.”
Whereupon he would get up and talk and talk, and pace the floor and
curse the delays until he had refreshed himself, and then perhaps wallow
in millions until breakfast-time.
Jones and Mackay, deeply interested, were willing to put up a reasonable
amount of money, but they were unable to see a profit in investing so
large a capital in a plant for constructing the machines.
Clemens prepared estimates showing that the American business alone
would earn thirty-five million dollars a year, and the European business
twenty million dollars more. These dazzled, but they did not convince
the capitalists. Jones was sincerely anxious to see the machine succeed,
and made an engagement to come out to see it work, but a day or
two before he was to come Paige was seized with an inspiration. The
type-setter was all in parts when the day came, and Jones's visit had to
be postponed. Goodman wrote that the fatal delay had “sicklied over the
bloom” of Jones's original enthusiasm.
Yet Clemens seems never to have been openly violent with Paige. In the
memorandum which he completed about this time he wrote:
Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and yet he
knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I would shut
out all human succor and watch that trap until he died.
He was grabbing at straws now. He offered a twentieth or a hundredth or
a thousandth part of the enterprise for varying sums, ranging from one
thousand to one hundred thousand dollars. He tried to capitalize his
advance (machine) royalties, and did dispose of a few of these; but
when the money came in for them he was beset by doubts as to the final
outcome, and though at his wit's ends for further funds, he returned the
checks to the friends who had sent them. One five-thousand-dollar check
from a friend named Arnot, in Elmira, went back by the next mail. He
was willing to sacrifice his own last penny, but he could not take money
from those who were blindly backing his judgment only and not their
own. He still had faith in Jones, faith which lasted up to the 13th of
February, 1891. Then came a final letter, in which Jones said that he
had canvassed the situation thoroughly with such men as Mackay, Don
Cameron, Whitney, and others, with the result that they would have
nothing to do with the machine. Whitney and Cameron, he said, were large
stockholders in the Mergenthaler. Jones put it more kindly and more
politely than that, and closed by saying that there could be no doubt as
to the machine's future an ambiguous statement. A letter from young
Hall came about the same time, urging a heavy increase of capital in the
business. The Library of American Literature, its leading feature, was
handled on the instalment plan. The collections from this source were
deferred driblets, while the bills for manufacture and promotion must
be paid down in cash. Clemens realized that for the present at least the
dream was ended. The family securities were exhausted. The book trade
was dull; his book royalties were insufficient even to the demands of
the household. He signed further notes to keep business going, left the
matter of the machine in abeyance, and turned once more to the trade of
authorship. He had spent in the neighborhood of one hundred and ninety
thousand dollars on the typesetter--money that would better have been
thrown into the Connecticut River, for then the agony had been more
quickly over. As it was, it had shadowed many precious years.