The First Writing-Machines
From My Unpublished Autobiography
Some days ago a correspondent sent in an old typewritten sheet, faded by age, containing
the following letter over the signature of Mark Twain:
"Hartford, March 10, 1875.
"Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge that fact that I own a
machine. I have entirely stopped using the typewriter, for the reason that I never could
write a letter with it to anybody without receiving a request by return mail that I would
not only describe the machine, but state what progress I had made in the use of it, etc.,
etc. I don't like to write letters, and so I don't want people to know I own this curiosity-
breeding little joker."
A note was sent to Mr. Clemens asking him if the letter was genuine and whether he
really had a typewriter as long ago as that. Mr. Clemens replied that his best answer is the
following chapter from his unpublished autobiography:
1904. VILLA QUARTO, FLORENCE, JANUARY.
Dictating autobiography to a typewriter is a new experience for me, but it goes very well,
and is going to save time and "language"-- the kind of language that soothes vexation.
I have dictated to a typewriter before--but not autobiography. Between that experience
and the present one there lies a mighty gap-- more than thirty years! It is sort of lifetime.
In that wide interval much has happened--to the type-machine as well as to the rest of us.
At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned
one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who DOESN'T
own one is a curiosity. I saw a type-machine for the first time in--what year? I suppose it
was 1873--because Nasby was with me at the time, and it was in Boston. We must have
been lecturing, or we could not have been in Boston, I take it. I quitted the platform that
season.
But never mind about that, it is no matter. Nasby and I saw the machine through a
window, and went in to look at it. The salesman explained it to us, showed us samples of
its work, and said it could do fifty-seven words a minute--a statement which we frankly
confessed that we did not believe. So he put his type-girl to work, and we timed her by
the watch. She actually did the fifty-seven in sixty seconds. We were partly convinced,
but said it probably couldn't happen again. But it did. We timed the girl over and over
again--with the same result always: she won out. She did her work on narrow slips of
paper, and we pocketed them as fast as she turned them out, to show as curiosities. The
price of the machine was one hundred and twenty-five dollars. I bought one, and we went
away very much excited.
