On 5 January 1889, Mark Twain watched with glee as an extraordinary invention clattered into life. “At 12.20 this afternoon,” wrote America’s most famous novelist, “a line of moveable type was spaced and justified by machinery, for the first time in the history of the world! And I was there to see it. It was done automatically, instantly, perfectly.” Surely this new printing press, into which he had poured his royalties from the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, would launch a revolutionary new information age. “Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton gins, sewing machines, Babbage machines, Jacquard looms, perfecting presses, Arkwright’s frames – all mere toys, simplicities!” The Paige Compositor should have made Twain’s fortune. Instead, it nearly destroyed him.
IN MARK TWAIN’s time, publishers were stuck in a technological bottleneck. The invention in 1843 of both mass-produced wood-pulp paper and the steam-powered rotary press allowed printing at blinding speeds and in huge quantities, yet typesetting remained a stubbornly slow process that had barely changed in centuries. Type was still set by hand, with a skilled printer preparing approximately 800 “ems” (about 100 words) an hour.
But by the early 1870s James Paige, a gifted mechanic in Rochester, New York, began to design the Paige Compositor, a clever mechanical rendering of the movements of a human typesetter. When Twain was introduced to Paige in 1880, he was immediately dazzled: “He is the Shakespeare of mechanical invention,” pronounced the novelist. As a publisher and former printing apprentice himself, Twain was convinced the machine would revolutionise the industry. By his own calculations, the Paige Compositor might be worth $150 million over the lifetime of its patents. He immediately began to pour money into Paige’s project.
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In December 1881, Paige demonstrated a prototype to a gathering of newspapermen and publishers. It was big, standing almost 2 metres high, and it was fast, enabling a single typesetter to set words from a keyboard at speeds up to 12,000 ems an hour. Unfortunately, Paige kept pausing to tinker with his baby, leaving the audience staring at motionless machinery for most of the time. Even so, W. D. Howells, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, was impressed. “It did everything but walk and talk,” he declared.
Indeed, the Paige Compositor was a wondrous piece of work…when it worked. The machine was temperamental: a bit of broken or transposed type quickly brought it to halt. Paige kept thinking up further improvements, including the ability to automatically justify text, and the compositor grew dizzyingly complex. Eventually it had 18,000 parts and 800 shaft bearings. Paige’s equally gargantuan patent application was known at the US Patent Office as “The Whale”. Undeterred, and even though Paige ignored his pleas to show investors a working model, Twain continued to hand over large sums of money. Paige, Twain admitted, “could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him. When he is present I always believe him; I can’t help it.”
What captivated Twain? The prospect of riches, certainly. But Paige also envisioned something that writers and booksellers still hanker after: print on demand. An article in the Chicago Tribune in 1892 still has a curiously familiar ring. “The poor but ambitious author – Mr. Paige says he is everywhere – has written a work which he feels within his burning soul is sure to be the long-looked for American novel. It is brief but it bristles. His pockets are empty, of course, and his frequent trips to heartless publishers have left him nothing but worn shoes and his manuscripts. He hears of this machine; he goes to it; his book is to be of 200 pages; he borrows $5 from his landlady and presto, in twenty minutes he has the prized novel, the child of his brain, in cold but clear type in his inside pocket.”
It remains an alluring vision. But then Twain always had a remarkable capacity for wonder, delight and sometimes sheer gullibility. In his youth he had briefly prospected for gold in Nevada, and his fascination with get-rich-quick schemes never left him. He sank thousands of dollars into the Fredonia Watch Company, which produced a “Mark Twain watch”, but proved curiously incapable of producing a Mark Twain royalty cheque.
Ever the optimist, he ploughed money into the Kaolotype, “a chalk engraving process”. This too ate money with no apparent result, whereupon a company official assured Twain that “there is one thing however you can depend upon. You are not being cheated and stolen from” – which, of course, he was. He then invested in a “bed clamp” to prevent babies kicking off their blankets: it didn’t work. In the midst of writing Huckleberry Finn, Twain even dabbled in a “hand grenade” fire extinguisher, a glass bottle filled with flame retardant to be hurled into a fire. It didn’t put out many fires, but it did burn a large wad of his cash.
Above all else, Twain invested in the Paige Compositor. One year after another passed without a completed machine, yet by 1886 Twain was handing over a ruinously generous $7000 a month. Paige had troubles of his own. There were wild rumours that he had become a millionaire, attracting the inevitable spongers and con artists.
“He was handing over a ruinously generous $7000 a month”
An actress in Chicago sued Paige for breach of promise – and $800,000 – claiming that the bewildered inventor had promised to marry her. Fortunately for Paige, the case fell apart when her actual husband (who had been abandoned by the ambitious young actress in New Jersey) showed up and contradicted her story.
Paige laboured on, insisting on ever more and complicated improvements until even Twain grew alarmed. “Business sanity would have said put it on the market as it was, secure the field, and add in improvements later,” wrote Twain. Instead, Paige kept dithering, until finally in 1886 disaster struck. Rival inventor Ottmar Mergenthaler unveiled his Linotype, a less ambitious but vastly more practical and reliable typesetting workhorse. Even now Paige continued to perfect his grand invention; years of maddening delay were relieved only by fleetingly successful demonstrations, such as the one in 1889 that had Twain waxing so lyrical. Paige’s endless stalling exasperated his backer. “If he were drowning,” said Twain, “I would throw him an anvil.”
In a desperate attempt to recoup something from his investment before the Linotype wrecked any chance of it, Twain’s life became an endless cycle of more bills from Paige, more missed deadlines and more humiliating attempts to summon up some new investors. A few friends and relatives pitched in, including a still-unknown theatrical manager by the name of Bram Stoker. Hard-nosed venture capitalists were less willing to take the risk. When Twain tried to persuade millionaire Andrew Carnegie to pump money into the compositor, the tycoon sensed that Twain had juggled too many schemes and commitments. “Put your eggs in one basket,” Carnegie advised Twain. “And watch that basket.”
The years rolled on and still no working model emerged from Paige’s workshop. With each new deadline, Twain pinned his hopes of financial salvation on Paige’s rapidly receding dream. “I have never been so desperate in my life,” Twain privately admitted in 1893, “and for good reason, for I haven’t got a penny to my name.”
A single working model was finally produced for a trial run at the Chicago Tribune in 1894, but by then it was far too late for Paige’s temperamental machine. At least $150,000 of Twain’s money was gone. In the end, Paige had to shut up shop, and America’s most popular author sold his Hartford mansion and set off on an exhausting round-the-world lecture tour to pay off his creditors.
Paige had a harder time. After disappearing from public view, the inventor surfaced penniless at Chicago’s Cook County Almshouse in 1917. He died a few months later and was buried in a pauper’s grave. The machine he squandered endless time and money on was bought as a prized relic by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company, the very competitor that had sealed its fate. Eventually it was donated to the Mark Twain House in Hartford, where it has never been taken apart, out of the eminently sensible concern that the only man who could put it back together died nearly a century ago. Mark Twain’s glorious and doomed machine stands mute and unusable in the very house whose proud owner it drove out.
