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his bad investments and obsession here was certainly something that brought him down, but I'm going to have to say what probably really ruined his life was his daughter Susy Clemens dying of spinal meningitis in 1896, 2 years after the bankruptcy.
As someone with some familiarity with Clemens, and stresses piled upon stresses, I feel it is somewhat insulting to the man to think he just couldn't handle losing some money and having his entrepreneurial dreams not work out, because really that is some minor stuff right there, and in the end he was still one of the most popular writers in the world, it was going through the stress and then getting more on top. Especially, as it is my experience, when you are going through something really difficult and are at your weakest, people try to take advantage of that. It would not have been a good therapy for his misanthropic bent.
THIS! Clemens was financially troubled more than once in his life due to bad investments but that wasn't what broke him. We're talking about a man who outlived 3/4 of his children and the wife he adored!
Didn’t he blame himself for her death because it supposedly happened because he had to go on the road again in order to pay for his debts?
I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". Monks writing out manuscripts is somewhat relatable since we all (at least for now) still learn how to write. Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work? Why was it still a pain and how did later inventions fix those problems?
I was able to do something probably few have, which is visit one of those small hole in the wall museums staffed essentially by just a single passionate old guy assembled with his life savings, dedicated to the printing press. Incredible experience.
Anyways, it’s been about 15 years, but the thing that made an impression on me was that it wasn’t just one invention. Gutenberg basically had to assemble like two dozen separate innovations to make it all work.
The type alloy (3 metals!) had to be just soft enough to cast easily, just expandable enough to set well, just hard enough to last. How to cast in quantity and re-melt as needed. The ink had to be just runny enough to apply easily but not so runny it gets everywhere, sticky enough to stick to type, and dry at a good middle speed. The blotter to apply the ink to type. The system of wooden casing to hold the pieces together with the right spacing, that won’t fall apart. How to set up the casing. The screw press needed to have very even pressure. The paper needed to be able to slide and take ink properly without spreading but also not tear. Proper fonts and ligatures for the type. And so on…
IIRC most things stayed pretty similar for a few hundred years, mostly changing stuff like the paper feeding mechanism or tweaking ink application or minor variations in how the lever or screw work. So to be honest, Gutenberg did almost all the hard work himself. It was a big deal because a lot of these smaller inventions had to come together for a narrow purpose all at once (on top of the obvious huge historical effect of cheaper books!)
Gutenberg's press was made out of a wine press. Letters were cast in lead, then lined up on a tray under the press. The tray was inked. A piece of paper was set over the inked letters, and the wine press forced the paper onto the letters. This cut the cost of a book by a factor of 300(!).
The trouble for Gutenberg was it was too easy to duplicate his press, and that combined with not being good at business led to his bankruptcy.
And at least as important are the surrounding economic, social, and archival systems for printed information. How much of the populace was literate? Was there licensing (for copyists or printers), copyright, public domain, or public libraries? Distribution systems? What sorts of material were being copied or printed? And how long did those materials physically last? My understanding is that there's a vast amount that we don't know about Ancient Rome, because their "paper" was papyrus - cheap and easy to make, but easily destroyed by rot in damp environments and by crumbling in dry environments.
> I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". [...] Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work?
Just go to technological museums in cities near you: there you can see and learn all these things.
That’d be nice, as a news nerd and pagemaker monkey myself. But school curriculums don’t even have the space to teach touch typing anymore. Or huge chunks of U.S. history (nevermind histories of countries far older).
In my school curriculum here in Vienna, this was very specifically taught in history class.
Most of the things school curricula touch turn awful.
It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.
> 3) Transformative technologies succeed by redesigning a task, and usually not by simply trying to reproduce the existing forms of human labor. Paige built an amazingly complex mechanical imitation of the human compositor which attempted to repeat a human worker’s actual movements. By contrast, Linotype simplified the problem by doing something humans didn’t already do.
That would in fact be the main argument against humanoid robots in many (most?) applications.
The counterpoint is that what humans already do is exactly what's needed in some cases, making those cases the ideal applications for humanoids.
Actually, no. Replicating the manual process was quite feasible.
There were keyboard-driven typesetters that worked well. Here's the Unitype.[1] This sets type by assembling type slugs into a line. It doesn't cast hot metal. It even has an automatic distribution system; it can sort type slugs by letter, so you can reuse the type. That's the same thing the Paige machine did. The Unitype was much simpler.
The Unitype was late to market. Mergenthaler already had the Linotype out when the Unitype shipped. The Unitype was half the price of a Linotype. Unitype machines sold for about 20 years, so it wasn't a total failure. The Paige machine uses a lot more parts and space to do the same job.
Mechanism design skill is very rare. All the good Teletype machines were designed by just two people - Howard Krum and Edward Kleinschmidt. There were competing machines, and they were all much worse. William Burroughs invented the first adding machine that worked reliably, and it was better than all the competitors. Burroughs dominated banking well into the computer era.
The video claims that the big problem with the Unitype that it required not just a keyboard operator, but someone manually justifying the lines at the output end. Linotype figured out automatic justification, using expanding wedges. No need for a second worker.
Plus someone had to feed used type back into the Unitype for sorting and return to inventory. With a Linotype, the matrices with the letter forms never leave the machine; they are dispensed, set into a line, used for casting, and then immediately recycled back to the magazine for further use. As long as the supply of lead bars ready to melt holds up, you can keep setting type. With ordinary type setting, mechanized or not, you can end up with all your type tied up in pages waiting to be printed.
So the real problem with the Unitype was that it wasn't labor-saving enough. Despite that, it powered many small country newspapers for years.
> The counterpoint is that what humans already do is exactly what's needed in some cases, making those cases the ideal applications for humanoids.
If my old textbook on control theory (printed in 80s) to be believed, there apparently were quite a lot of processes where simply recording the video of hand/arm movements of the human operators, smoothing the trajectories, and then making the mechanical manipulators simply follow them, was precisely the fastest and cheapest way to automate, compared to trying to reimagine the whole process and rebuild a whole manufacturing line with the newly invented machines.
Humanoids are the Turing machines of physics.
They're Mediocre at everything, and worse than a dedicated machine at almost every task, just like a CPU is worse than an ASIC. However, they adapt to new tasks quickly. This decreases ownership costs (you only need one humanoid, not one machine per task), as well as manufacturing costs, as you can make one design and spend a lot of R&D money on scaling that design.
See also: the sewing machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sewing_machine
The 30 second version, sewing is very labor intensive and people started trying to make a sewing machine from about when manufacturing tolerances got tight enough to attempt the process. It still took about 100 years until machines that actually work well were invented, The genius bit that took so long is to not try and sew like a human does but to develop an inverted process that a machine can do. Honestly, despite being quite common at this point in time sewing machines still blow my mind when you consider the intricate process they are required to do with thread.
And a fun fact for free: Apparently patent cartels(cough MPEG LA) are not a new thing and Singer et al set one up in the 1850's to lock up the market on these marvelous machines.
This whole episode suggests to me that people are misjudging the future of robotics. Many companies are building robots to exactly imitate humans, perhaps with the thought that the "egocentric" training data widely available will be more useful for this form factor. Look at Tesla, Unitree, Boston Dynamics, or Figure... But humans are just barely adapted to bipedalism and hunter-gathering as it is.
The perfect kind of robot is perhaps something closer to the linotype... a AI controlled macine that has the capability to birth or re-assemble to be optimal for the task at hand. Just like the linotype automated the "casting" of lines of text.
Not necessarily a 3d printer or a nanobot universal assembler... but maybe something more akin to a modular assembly line that can rearrange itself intelligently.
If you have a general solution like a robot that can do human tasks, i.e. copying manuscripts with a pen, that is often highly inefficient compared to a specialized solution like a printing press but the R&D effort of applying it is minimal compared to inventing a specialized machine.
It's similar with LLMs. Compared to a bespoke piece of software for the task they are incredibly inefficient, yet they are extremely useful because they can do things where developing that piece of software would require a lot of research.
Well, LLMs are a great example of the argument for the power of doing what "humans already do": language, however imperfect for the task, so maybe humanoid robots turn out to be the most natural way to interact with a human environment (broad strokes here, I know, but hopefully you get the gist)
The counterpoint is that we already exploited a lot of the cases where simplifying the problem helps. We've spent approximately two centuries doing that. That leaves a lot of processes left over where that kind of specialization was either not feasible or not economically attractive
> That would in fact be the main argument against humanoid robots in many (most?) applications.
Buy one robot, use it for many things, is an attractive proposition I think
I wish the article talked more about how the machine actually worked. It seemed pretty simplistic and glossed over most of the details, but now I'm really curious and want answers lol.
Maybe: https://www.asme.org/about-asme/engineering-history/landmark...
To see a typecaster which works find a Linotype or Monotype.
As linked in the article, you could read the patent application:
https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncastcom...
> but his main talent appeared to have been his skill at raising money by promising the impossible — the 19th century version of Steve Job’s reality distortion field.
That’s a wild mischaracterization. Steve Job’s “reality distortion field” was coined after the ability to get people to achieve the impossible and deliver better products; quite the opposite of funneling money into dead end ideas.
> Steve Job’s “reality distortion field” was coined after the ability to get people to achieve the impossible and deliver better products;
I was under the impression it was about Steve convincing the faithful that Apple invented the categories of products they sold, rather than simply delivering better products in existing categories.
> That’s a wild mischaracterization. Steve Job’s “reality distortion field” was coined after the ability to get people to achieve the impossible and deliver better products; quite the opposite of funneling money into dead end ideas.
Apple is widely successful, and their products are highly regarded so it's a good spot to be in.
I always find it strange when 'achieve the impossible' tag is attached to him or the products that came along. take iphone for example - there were ton of products that were way ahead of their time way before iphone came along - palmpilot (grafitti handwriting), handspring, hp pocketpc (a buddy of mine had a working vnc client on it during days of wifi infancy), and of course the original blackberry.
Classic angel investor mistake, too much allocated to one investment. Gotta diversify. More smaller checks.
Yeah wanna write 100k cheques? Better have a net worth of 100M or a way to pool investor money.
I thought this was going to be about Nikola Tesla's vibration machine that made Clemens shit himself
It's interesting to see how — even in the 1880s — people were making the same mistakes as companies today: over-engineering to the point of unmanageable complexity ("complexity bad"[0]), and the less solve-all-possible-problems but simpler Linotype won out.
[0] - https://grugbrain.dev/
Mark Twain himself wrote a story about a sure thing, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County:
https://readmeastoryink.com/wp-content/uploads/stories/the_c...
I used to fantasize about using computers to print stuff. I ended up at a little company that made desktop publishing software. While I was employed there, I went on vacation in Chicago and found myself in the basement of the former Donnelly printing plant where Sears-Robuck catalogs were printed. They had an exhibit of old printing presses, and at least one of them functioned. The docent told small groups how they worked. I told him my occupation, and he played off me as he lectured. He printed a souvenir for me, a little bit of paper with “Quality isn’t quick” written on it. Except there was an upside down ‘n’ where a ‘u’ belonged.
The organization used an antique letterpress to print up invitations for weddings and such.
> I’d argue that there’s a clear line connecting the automation of typesetting and counting in the late 19th century to the rise of electrical computers a generation later, and then the early Internet and AI research a generation after that.
And I'd argue that's very generous.
It's pretty ironic to read about Twain losing his fortune to bad investments, after satirizing sketchy investments in "The Gilded Age."
"For Twain, though (and one suspects for Paige himself), the dream of mechanically mimicking human actions was what fascinated him most. Twain’s writings... came to see the Paige machine as a “creature” in its own right."
History doesn't repeat, it rhymes.
More details in this version: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2023/03/the-machine...
Highly recommend reading.
FWIW, a glimpse of the sole surviving Paige machine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWW8rjuikXE
Surprised there has not been a biographical drama about Twain on AMC or something.
I don't like the first photo, historical photos getting colorized does not feel right to me, as all the colors are just assumptions and the whole thing may have looked different in real and if we look at this photo it sure did
> The easy moral of the story is that Twain was gullible and Paige a huxster.
It absolutely isn't. Paige was actually the engineer/tinkerer earnestly developing this machine, which really worked. One of his main problems is that he always thought he needed to improve it more before it was ready. He didn't understand "release early and often": that time-to-market matters.
> Twain felt that he had an insider’s perspective and could intuit how others in publishing would respond to the machine. But he was a printer’s devil no longer: he was a famous, millionaire author.
No longer, perhaps, but Twain had been in the printing industry, so he knew a thing or two. From age 13, Twain worked as a typesetter and compositor for newspapers. So even if he overestimated his knowledge of that, it was not simply the conceit of someone cushioned. What he remembered from his past experiences with freely moving type set by hand would have still been relevant at the time he embarked on this thing with Paige. Linotype was not yet in the market.
Even as the Linotype appeared, it was not obvious that it is superior. It is a gross simplification to say that Paige's machine was imitating manual typesetting whereas the Linotype wasn't. Both machines work by moving letter blocks into rows, and the letters have to be sorted.
Evidently, what the Linotype did better was:
- Linotype characters are negatives, made of brass. Brass is hard and durable. These negatives are cast to positives with molten lead. The lead is melted for reuse after a run of the typesetting. Paige used cast lead pieces, which were more or less permanent. The same letter "A" would be used over and over again in different typesetting jobs. Lead is heavy to move around in the machine as well as soft. Brass allows nicks or slots to be cut in it for easy sorting into bins, but if you do the same with lead, it won't be durable; these features will wear out and cause missorting and jams.
- Paige's system used a complex system for justifying words and filling spaces at the ends of paragraphs and whatnot; it had to calculate and insert spacers. Linotype had clever tricks: special wedge-based expander bars were inserted between words, and then pressure against the bars expanded the sliding wedges to justify an entire line at a time. So in that regard, that's where Linotype deviated from trying to imitate manual typesetting.
- A key difference is that Linotype makes one line at a time, out of brass moulds, with spacers between. This is then cast with molten lead: just one line, called a slug. After a line is cast, the brass moulds can be released and sorted back into bins. The lead slugs are assembled into a page. Paige's system, maybe because of his surname, tried to work more traditionally, typesetting a whole page. That creates a problem because of the limitations of the workspace. If you are doing lines separately, you can have machinery/tooling/jigging above and below the line; there is no consideration for interference with previous or subsequent line of text. This freedom is what enabled the mechanisms for spacing to be developed.
But the thing to note is, that the Linotype changed typesetting work into something more heavily industrial, involving continuous hot metal casting.
Paige and Twain might have been betting on such a change being rejected by the industry, in favor of their solution which was doing the same sort of typesetting.
Side note: The linotype, which Paige's machine is compared to, was one of my favourite machines to discover existed. Such a clever design.
One lesson to add:
Any investment can go to zero, so better size it accordingly.
super interesting article thanks never heard of the entire story. uncanny parallels to todays humanlikewritermachines and the billions being lost and won there.
He was a writer, he should have stayed in his lane.
nice article, but how do you think it applies to today's world with AI?
> promising the impossible — the 19th century version of Steve Job’s reality distortion field.
Seriously, that’s your best example of that lately? Not, I don’t know, Tesla FSD? Theranos? Bernie Madoff?