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

26 Make: Volume 09

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 ( bruce@well.com) is a science fiction writer and part-time design professor.