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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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
super interesting article thanks never heard of the entire story. uncanny parallels to todays humanlikewritermachines and the billions being lost and won there.
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.
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.
I 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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
33 comments
[ 0.60 ms ] story [ 36.9 ms ] threadIt 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.
Seriously, that’s your best example of that lately? Not, I don’t know, Tesla FSD? Theranos? Bernie Madoff?
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.
Buy one robot, use it for many things, is an attractive proposition I think
https://readmeastoryink.com/wp-content/uploads/stories/the_c...
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.
Highly recommend reading.
[0] - https://grugbrain.dev/
It was like trying to publish the first draft of your novel without ever having an editor go over it.
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.
And I'd argue that's very generous.
The organization used an antique letterpress to print up invitations for weddings and such.