THE FIRST WRITING-MACHINES
From My Unpublished Autobiography
Some days ago a correspondent sent in an old typewritten sheet, faded byage, containing the following letter over the signature of Mark Twain:
"Hartford, March 10, 1875.
"Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge thatfact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the typewriter,for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybodywithout receiving a request by return mail that I would not onlydescribe the machine, but state what progress I had made in the use ofit, etc., etc. I don't like to write letters, and so I don't want peopleto know I own this curiosity-breeding little joker."
A note was sent to Mr. Clemens asking him if the letter was genuineand whether he really had a typewriter as long ago as that. Mr.Clemens replied that his best answer is the following chapter from hisunpublished autobiography:
1904. VILLA QUARTO, FLORENCE, JANUARY.
Dictating autobiography to a typewriter is a new experience for me, butit goes very well, and is going to save time and "language"--the kind oflanguage that soothes vexation.
I have dictated to a typewriter before--but not autobiography. Betweenthat experience and the present one there lies a mighty gap--more thanthirty years! It is a sort of lifetime. In that wide interval muchhas happened--to the type-machine as well as to the rest of us. At thebeginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The personwho owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about:the person who _doesn't_ own one is a curiosity. I saw a type-machinefor the first time in--what year? I suppose it was 1873--becauseNasby was with me at the time, and it was in Boston. We must have beenlecturing, or we could not have been in Boston, I take it. I quitted theplatform that season.
But never mind about that, it is no matter. Nasby and I saw the machinethrough a window, and went in to look at it. The salesman explained itto us, showed us samples of its work, and said it could do fifty-sevenwords a minute--a statement which we frankly confessed that we did notbelieve. So he put his type-girl to work, and we timed her by thewatch. She actually did the fifty-seven in sixty seconds. We were partlyconvinced, but said it probably couldn't happen again. But it did. Wetimed the girl over and over again--with the same result always: she wonout. She did her work on narrow slips of paper, and we pocketed them asfast as she turned them out, to show as curiosities. The price of themachine was one hundred and twenty-five dollars. I bought one, and wewent away very much excited.
At the hotel we got out our slips and were a little disappointed to findthat they contained the same words. The girl had economized timeand labor by using a formula which she knew by heart. However, weargued--safely enough--that the _first _type-girl must naturally takerank with the first billiard-player: neither of them could be expectedto get out of the game any more than a third or a half of what was init. If the machine survived--_if_ it survived--experts would come to thefront, by and by, who would double the girl's output without a doubt.They would do one hundred words a minute--my talking speed on theplatform. That score has long ago been beaten.
At home I played with the toy, repeating and repeating and repeating"The Boy stood on the Burning Deck," until I could turn that boy'sadventure out at the rate of twelve words a minute; then I resumed thepen, for business, and only worked the machine to astonish inquiringvisitors. They carried off many reams of the boy and his burning deck.
By and by I hired a young woman, and did my first dictating (letters,merely), and my last until now. The machine did not do both capitals andlower case (as now), but only capitals. Gothic capitals they were, andsufficiently ugly. I remember the first letter I dictated, it was toEdward Bok, who was a boy then. I was not acquainted with him at thattime. His present enterprising spirit is not new--he had it in thatearly day. He was accumulating autographs, and was not content with meresignatures, he wanted a whole autograph _letter_. I furnished it--intype-written capitals, _signature and all._ It was long; it was asermon; it contained advice; also reproaches. I said writing was my_trade_, my bread-and-butter; I said it was not fair to ask a manto give away samples of his trade; would he ask the blacksmith for ahorseshoe? would he ask the doctor for a corpse?
Now I come to an important matter--as I regard it. In the year '74the young woman copied a considerable part of a book of mine _on themachine_. In a previous chapter of this Autobiography I have claimedthat I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephonein the house for practical purposes; I will now claim--untildispossessed--that I was the first person in the world to _apply thetype-machine to literature_. That book must have been _The Adventures OfTom Sawyer._ I wrote the first half of it in '72, the rest of it in '74.My machinist type-copied a book for me in '74, so I concluded it wasthat one.
That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects--devilish ones.It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. Aftera year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thoughtI would give it to Howells. He was reluctant, for he was suspicious ofnovelties and unfriendly toward them, and he remains so to this day. ButI persuaded him. He had great confidence in me, and I got him to believethings about the machine that I did not believe myself. He took it hometo Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.
He kept it six months, and then returned it to me. I gave it away twiceafter that, but it wouldn't stay; it came back. Then I gave it to ourcoachman, Patrick McAleer, who was very grateful, because he did notknow the animal, and thought I was trying to make him wiser and better.As soon as he got wiser and better he traded it to a heretic for aside-saddle which he could not use, and there my knowledge of itshistory ends.