Chapter 3 from 10 Disasters That Ruined Smart People
Mark Twain: The Machine That Ate a Fortune
On January 5, 1889, Samuel Clemens watched a machine set type.23
Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was by then the most famous writer in America. He had also become a businessman. In 1884 he had founded a publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Company, and placed Charles Webster, his nephew by marriage, in charge.24 The firm had scored an enormous success with Grant’s memoirs.
The machine was the Paige Compositor, invented by James W. Paige. In the 1880s, newspapers and books were still set largely by hand, letter by letter. A machine that could do this automatically would transform printing. Twain had backed it for years, and the trial in January 1889 seemed to confirm his faith. The compositor weighed almost four tons.25
It never worked reliably enough to sell. Its complexity meant constant adjustments and breakdowns. Meanwhile a competing machine, the Linotype, which cast whole lines of type from molten metal, was simpler, worked well, and took over the industry.26
The rest of this chapter is in the complete book.
It continues with the mechanism behind the loss and ends with The Pattern, plus the sources for every claim.
Notes and sources
- Richard Zacks, “The 19th-Century Start-Ups That Cost Mark Twain His Fortune,” Time (April 19, 2016), https:/
/ . ↩time. com/ 4297572/ mark- twain- bad- business/ - Time, “Mark Twain’s Bad Business”; “Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant,” Wikipedia. ↩
- Time, “Mark Twain’s Bad Business.” ↩
- “Paige Compositor,” Wikipedia, citing John Lienhard, “The Paige Compositor,” Engines of Our Ingenuity, University of Houston. ↩
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