Anita's Notebook

Mark Twain’s novels are so famous that even a hundred years later almost everybody has read one of his stories. When he was alive he made a huge fortune from the sales of his books, but lost it all due to one machine: the Paige Compositor.

A Machine For A Crappy Job

The Paige Compositor was supposed to do the work of a typesetter, which was an important but really crappy and tedious job of setting up individual letters for printing newspapers or books. Only humans were able to do this job (miserable the whole time no doubt) so a machine that could take over the work would be worth a lot.

Mark Twain had been a typesetter when he was younger so when the inventor of the machine approached him for funding he thought it was a perfect investment.

Over time he became very enthusiastic about the invention and sunk more and more money into it’s development thinking that it would come back to him in spades. He ended up spending not only the money he’d made from his books but also his wife’s inheritance as well.

If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It

There was one problem though, the inventor of the Paige Compositor obviously had never been taught the whole ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ rule. He kept messing with the machine and overimproving it, taking fourteen years to finally put a model out for general testing.

By that time another typesetting machine called the Linotype was already in use by newspapers and printing houses. But Mark Twain and the inventor of the Paige Compositor still felt confident as they viewed their machine as superior since it could work sixty percent faster than the Linotype.

Disaster

It was a bad omen that during it’s inagural test run at the Chicago Herald the Paige Compositor was surrounded by Linotype machines busily working away. As you can imagine though, Mark Twain was just happy that the darn thing was finally being used in the real world. During this time he was quoted as saying ‘It seems to me that things couldn’t well be going better at Chicago.’

Unfortunately there was a problem: the machine sucked big time. After fourteen years of being messed with it had over 18,000 parts, many of which would break down after a short time. To make things worse it was very expensive to get the it going again and often the inventor had to be called in to do it himself since he was the only person that understood its complexity.

It soon became obvious that the Paige Compositor had no future.

The Hartford House

After spending his (and his wife’s) entire fortune and fourteen years waiting for the payoff Mark Twain was forced to declare bankruptcy and move out of his home in Hartford, Connecticut.

Later on in life he was able to recover a bit financially thanks to the help of a prominent businessman he befriended who basically took over his finances and made him go on lecture tours to pay off his debts. He carefully paid off all his debtors even though since he’d declared bankruptcy he wasn’t legally required to do so.

The last surviving Paige Compositor now sits in the official Mark Twain Museum which is located at his old house in Hartford.