The inventor Clemens called “an extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity” moved to Hartford in the mid-1870s and, in collaboration with the Farnham Company, began to develop his typesetting machine. SLC met Paige in 1881 and invested in his project, at first in a small way. It was claimed that the machine could set type at ten times the rate of a human compositor, but it was amazingly complex (more than eighteen thousand parts) and highly unreliable. SLC nevertheless persisted in his support of Paige, providing large sums of money over the next thirteen years. In the fall of 1894 SLC’s business adviser, Henry Huttleston Rogers, inspected a prototype and concluded that the Paige compositor had no commercial potential; SLC, who had invested over $150,000 (more than $3 million in today’s dollars), had to acknowledge that the machine was a failure. Paige’s later inventions and patents brought him no money; he died in poverty in Oak Forest, Illinois.