The “Compositor” of James Paige, the Victorian robotic equivalent of a nimble-fingered, teenage Sam Clemens. The Charles Babbage Difference engine, also a conspic-

uous failure, was a “mere commonplace” compared to this “awful mechanical miracle.”

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.

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, sim-plicities! 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

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