Mark Twain Said His Typesetting Machine Would Rival the Human Mind

In 1889, Mark Twain, the American author, was writing to his brother Orion, who shared his obsession with invention. Twain had met inventor James W. Paige in 1880 and put his money into Paige's Compositor, a bulky apparatus for lining up metal letters for printing that ranked among the most complex machines yet built. He called it “a cunning devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived.”

He called the machine a “creature” as well as a cunning devil. He had earlier called it an “awful mechanical miracle” beside which, he wrote, “All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces.” In his letters, he predicted it would make “telephones, locomotives,” even “Babbage calculators,” early mechanical devices for doing math, seem like “mere toys, simplicities!” Twain called the typesetter an “immense historical birth,” the arrival of a new breed of machines that might one day act like minds.

By the 1880s, Twain was describing the Paige machine as a “creature” in its own right. Perfected, he believed, it would be as “complex as that machine which it ranks next to,” the human mind, and would bring great riches and control to whoever owned it. His housemaid later recalled, “he was expecting such wonderful things from it... he thought he'd make millions and own the world.”

Twain got the direction right and the machine wrong. The Paige device grew to more than 18,000 parts, and proved too hard to mass produce and repair. It lost to the simpler and cheaper Linotype, which did not try to copy every motion of the human compositor but cast complete lines of type instead. His decade-long quest to automate printing basically destroyed his life, his biographers concluded, and he went bankrupt while Paige died largely forgotten. Just a single example of his machine still exists. A line runs from mechanized printing and calculating to computers, the Internet, and AI research. Their mistake, Twain and Paige's, was “assuming that seeing the future was the same thing as knowing how to bring it about.”