4 ms·
The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
- NopIdoN 2mo agoI thought this was going to be about Nikola Tesla's vibration machine that made Clemens shit himself
- Mistletoe 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paige_Compositor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paige_Compositor
- abirch 2mo agoWhen I heard that story, I couldn't help but thing of Steve Jobs "Real Artists Ship." The device was good but the inventor was a perfectionist instead of an entrepreneur.
- edoceo 2mo agoClassic angel investor mistake, too much allocated to one investment. Gotta diversify. More smaller checks.
- hahahaa 2mo agoYeah wanna write 100k cheques? Better have a net worth of 100M or a way to pool investor money.
- brcmthrowaway 2mo agoThere's definitely someone worth 100M here. Saikat, where are you?
- s3p 2mo agoI 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.
- WillAdams 2mo agoMaybe: https://www.asme.org/about-asme/engineering-history/landmarks/11-paige-compositor https://www.asme.org/about-asme/engineering-history/landmark... To see a typecaster which works find a Linotype or Monotype.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- wvenable 2mo agoAs linked in the article, you could read the patent application: https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncastcomp/paige/us-0547860-paige/index.html https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncastcom...
- cubefox 2mo ago[flagged]
- jrflowers 2mo agoReading about a machine from one hundred and fifty years ago and getting progressively more and more upset that the writing doesn’t give sufficient praise to the real topic of every article, my lovely chat bot
- cubefox 2mo agoMy lovely pocket calculator, he says these are lessons for us, for the present. And, since he is talking about technology in general, presumably for the future. The past events were only the inspiration.
- jrflowers 2mo agoI don’t think this article about Mark Twain, a famous guy one hundred and fifty years ago, lost all of his money betting on the wrong thing is about chat bots. He lost his money before all that We will never know if Mark Twain would have or would not have lost his money betting on chat bots because he lost it all on a different machine that didn’t work
- cubefox 2mo ago> Twain’s vision of hundreds of thousands of human-like language machines taking over the world would have to wait a century or two. (...) > 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. (...) > I think there are three transferrable lessons we can pull from this story: (...)
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- kazinator 2mo ago> 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.
- shawkinaw 2mo ago> 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?
- dyzone 2mo agoLLM sycophancy
- arbuge 2mo ago> 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.
- hnchm 2mo agoWell, 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)
- somenameforme 2mo agoAnother point on this is that as you improve the robot you improve those endless tasks it can do, whereas with specialized robots improvements to that specialization are much more limited in scope. So there's a lot more incentive and value to be gained from improving the tech than there are for specialized solutions. Sike with LLMs.
- gofreddygo 2mo agoA group of specialized actors with deeper singular skills, working on a task, well coordinated outperform a single actor with wider, shallower skills. I acknowledge that the depth the group brings is at a cost higher than the single actor and it isn't always a better thing.
- adrianN 2mo agoIf 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.
- ekelsen 2mo agoI 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?
- rcbdev 2mo agoIn my school curriculum here in Vienna, this was very specifically taught in history class.
- ekelsen 2mo agoThat's really awesome! Did they have you try and typeset something by hand? I feel like for us it presented as some magical thing that made producing books trivially easy, whereas in reality typesetting a page was still very labor intensive and not that fast!
- WalterBright 2mo agoThe printer setup is where all the cost is, the printing itself is practically free.
- vee-kay 2mo ago[dead]
- ekelsen 2mo agoI think even the printing was still not _that_ fast. You needed to physically press down each page. Make sure the ink was right, replace the paper, make sure not to smudge anything, etc. I'd be surprised if they could average more than 2 pages / minute? Which for 1000 pages is still a full days work.
- WalterBright 2mo ago
- fwipsy 2mo agoIt's pretty ironic to read about Twain losing his fortune to bad investments, after satirizing sketchy investments in "The Gilded Age."
- thinking_cactus 2mo agoIt makes a little sense to me that would be the case. People tend to write things they find relevant for their own life or surrounding. That is, he might be putting into paper a kind of warning to himself.
- fwipsy 2mo agoTo me it indicates that he knew how easy it is to lose your shirt, likely from the examples of his peers -- and then he did anyways.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo agoBut he sounded so clever with his quippy little lines... America loves appearances more than the reality
- fwipsy 2mo agoAmericans love making pithy generalized critiques of their own culture based on inconsequential anecdotes.
- gws 2mo agoOne lesson to add: Any investment can go to zero, so better size it accordingly.
- dyzone 2mo agoMid cap and large cap mutual funds are pretty safe right?
- wolfi1 2mo agoI 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
- saidnooneever 2mo agosuper interesting article thanks never heard of the entire story. uncanny parallels to todays humanlikewritermachines and the billions being lost and won there.
- willturman 2mo agoMark Twain himself wrote a story about a sure thing, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: https://readmeastoryink.com/wp-content/uploads/stories/the_celebrated_jumping_frog_of_calaveras_county.pdf https://readmeastoryink.com/wp-content/uploads/stories/the_c...
- foo42 2mo agoSide note: The linotype, which Paige's machine is compared to, was one of my favourite machines to discover existed. Such a clever design.
- bryanrasmussen 2mo agohis 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.
- pikminguy 2mo agoTHIS! 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!
- chaostheory 2mo agoDidn’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?
- bryanrasmussen 2mo agoI don't know, probably. This kind of thing all goes together and you tend to become very bitter towards people.
- kungfooey 2mo agoYes, he was in Europe at the time. Chernow's biography of Clemens, while ridiculously long (audiobook was > 40 hours) was also very good and spent quite a bit of time on this. I do suspect financial losses were a big contributor -- but part of it wasn't just that he lost _his_ money, but also his wife's inheritance. Of course, even aside from this money-losing invention, they were quite the profligate spenders.
- jambalaya8 2mo agoSurprised there has not been a biographical drama about Twain on AMC or something.
- felooboolooomba 2mo agoMore details in this version: https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2023/03/the-machine-that-bankrupted-mark-twain/ https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2023/03/the-machine... Highly recommend reading.
- sarreph 2mo agoIt'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/ https://grugbrain.dev/
- pydry 2mo agoAlso treating machines as worker or job substitutes instead of amplifying tools. I see that mistake made on literally every level from the automation of 15 minute tasks to analysis of the macroeconomic effects of robots and software.
- jandrese 2mo agoI would say it was the opposite. The machine was overdesigned and underengineered. Someone needed to stop the guy and tell him that getting 18,000 precision parts working in unison is bad design and he needed several passes of engineering out as much complexity as possible to simplify the whole thing. It was like trying to publish the first draft of your novel without ever having an editor go over it.
- ninadphalak 2mo agonice article, but how do you think it applies to today's world with AI?
- fearmerchant 2mo agoHe was a writer, he should have stayed in his lane.
- tweetle_beetle 2mo agoIt is well known that all true investors are born with innate instincts for entrepreneurship and do not distract themselves with other careers, skills or knowledge.
- ricardobeat 2mo ago> 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.
- toast0 2mo ago> 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.
- MPSimmons 2mo agoIt was coined by Apple engineers who would agree to whatever Steve wanted them to do while Steve was at their desk, and then when he left they'd be distraught over what they'd agreed to. https://www.folklore.org/Reality_Distortion_Field.html https://www.folklore.org/Reality_Distortion_Field.html
- killerstorm 2mo agoHmm, that's basically a fancy way to describe psychological pressure and persuasion.
- pwthornton 2mo agoNo, it was first coined by people who worked for him in the early 80s. He was really trying to push the limits of what was possible and convinced people working under him to do so.
- mirmor23 2mo ago> 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.
- bcjdjsndon 2mo ago> 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.
- cardiffspaceman 2mo agoI 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.
- JoeDaDude 2mo agoFWIW, a glimpse of the sole surviving Paige machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWW8rjuikXE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWW8rjuikXE
- m3047 2mo ago"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.