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hartford, dec. 9,
dear brother:
i am trying t to get the hang of this new f fangled writing machine, but am not making a shining success of it. however this is the first attempt i ever have made, & yet i perceivethat i shall soon & easily acquire a fine facility in its use. i saw the thing in boston the other day & was greatly taken wi:th it. susie has struck the keys once or twice, & no doubt has printed some letters which do not belong where she put them.
the having been a compositor is likely to be a great help to me,since o ne chiefly needs swiftness in banging the keys.the machine costs 125 dollars.the machine has several virtues i believe it will print faster than i can write. one may lean back in his chair & work it. it piles an awful stack of words on one page. it dont muss things or scatter ink blots around. of course it saves paper.
susie is gone, now, & i fancy i shall make better progress. working this type-writer reminds me of old robert buchanan, who, you remember, used to set up articles at the case without previously putting them in the form of manuscript.i was lost in admiration of such marvelous intellectual capacity.
love to mollie.
your brother,
sam.
Explanatory Notes
I saw a type-machine for the first time in—what year? I suppose it was 1873 1871—
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 or the next. 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 $125. I bought one, and we went away very much excited. At the hotel we got out our slips and were a little disappointed to find that they all contained the same
words. The girl had economized time and labor by using a formula which she knew by heart. However, we argued—safely
enough—that the first type-girl must naturally take rank with the first billiard-player: neither of
them could be expected to get out of the game any more than a third or a half of what was in it. If the machine
survived—if it survived—experts would come to the front, by-and-by, who would double this
girl’s output without a doubt. They would do a hundred words a minute—my talking-speed on the platform. That score
has long ago been beaten. At home I played with the toy, repeating and repeating and repeating
“The Boy stood on the Burning Deck,” until I could turn that boy’s adventure out at the rate of twelve words
a minute; then I resumed the pen, for business, and only worked the machine to astonish inquiring visitors. They carried off many
reams of the boy and his burning deck. By-and-by I hired a young woman, and did my dictating (letters,
mainly,) and my last until now. The machine did not do both capitals and lower case (as now), but only capitals. Gothic capitals
they were, and sufficiently ugly. . . . Now I come to an important
matter—as I regard it. In the year ’74 ’73 the young woman copied a considerable part of a book of
mine on the machine. . . . I will now claim—until dispossessed—that I was the
first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I wrote the first half of it in ’72, the rest of it in ’73. My
machinist type-copied a book for me in ’73, so I conclude it was that one. (CU-MARK) Clemens must have purchased the typewriter during his recent stay in Boston, on
Saturday, 14 November, or Monday, 16 November, arranging for it to be delivered to Hartford, where it probably arrived shortly
before he used it for the present letter. And although there is no mention of Petroleum V. Nasby (David Ross Locke) either in
Clemens’s letters or in Twichell’s journal account of the Boston visit, Nasby was in Boston at the time, staying at
the Tremont House between lectures in the area. He did not buy a typewriter, but by late 1875 he was a New York sales agent for
it. Clemens’s account of the writing of Tom Sawyer was only partly accurate (see 25 Feb 74 to Fairbanks, n. 4). Moreover, no part of that book was typed
for him. His first typed literary manuscript, possibly the first, was Life on the
Mississippi, copied from his handwritten manuscript in 1882 by an Elmira typist, Harry M. Clarke, on a different machine from
the one Clemens owned in late 1874. “The boy stood on the burning deck” was the first line of Felicia
Hemans’s poem “Casabianca,” first published in 1829 (“The City,” Boston Globe, 14 Nov 74, 5; “Platform Notes,” Boston Herald, 15 Nov 74, 2; Current, 73, 87;
Harrison, 219–20; CY, 610–11; HF, xxxii, 433–34).
Source text(s):Previous publication:
L6, 308–310; Paine 1912, 250, 255, and MTB, 1:535, facing 536, excerpt and facsimile; Kinnaird.
Provenance:See McKinney Family Papers in Description of Provenance.
