[HN Gopher] A machine that bankrupted Mark Twain
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A machine that bankrupted Mark Twain
Author : signa11
Score : 101 points
Date : 2023-03-31 11:25 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.todayifoundout.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.todayifoundout.com)
| [deleted]
| jrootabega wrote:
| Sounds like it was great technology that was just badly realized
| by its human inventor. Twain shouldn't have invested in an
| inventor; he should have invested in an inventing machine, or
| perhaps even an investing machine.
| 015UUZn8aEvW wrote:
| Right, it seems like the machine could have been a success if
| someone had forced the inventor to ship it when it was good
| enough, instead of letting him tinker with it for years.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Possibly. From the article it sounds like the first customer
| was unable to maintain the machine because it was so
| complicated, and had to get the Paige guy on-site to keep it
| running, that sort of thing isn't viable for mass production.
| Animats wrote:
| That wasn't the problem. It was that it really was a type
| setting machine. The Mergenthaler Linotype is a type casting
| machine - it casts metal slugs with one line of text. The
| brass matrices from which the type is cast are reused within
| a minute or two. The matrices have a set of binary coded
| notches on the top which allow them to be sorted
| automatically. With type setting, you don't get the letters
| back until you're done printing, and so you need huge
| supplies of type, which has to be sorted after use. Linotype
| slugs just get melted down for the next go-round.
|
| Here's how a Linotype works.[1] There are more popular
| videos, but this training film gets across how the machine
| really works.
|
| The article mentions the Linotype being slower than the Paige
| compositor. That was probably true of early Linotype
| machines. Later machines added more concurrency. From
| pictures of the early machines, it looks like there's only
| one assembly and casting station. The typist could get ahead
| of the caster and have to wait for it to finish. That was
| quickly fixed once they had some operational experience. In
| later machines, it's an assembly line - the matrices are
| assembled into a line, moved to a holding station by the
| assembly elevator, and then moved to a casting station when
| the caster is free. With that buffering, the typist doesn't
| have to wait for the caster.
|
| Roughly the same design was used for over eighty years, with
| only minor changes. Which is surprising, considering how
| bulky the machine is and how clunky the design looks.
|
| The only real competition was from Monotype, which also made
| a line caster, but with a completely different approach.[2]
| Monotype machines have a keyboard and paper tape punch as the
| input device. The caster, a separate machine, has a paper
| tape reader. It's more compact than a Linotype, but the
| caster, which casts one character at a time, is slower, at
| about 3 chars/second. So a big shop might need more casters
| than keyboard units.
|
| Amusingly, the Monotype caster reads the paper tape in
| reverse. This allows the typist to "backspace" and cancel the
| previous character or line from the keyboard, since the
| caster sees the cancel before starting work on the line. On a
| Linotype, to correct an error, you have to finish out the
| line (this is where ETAOIN SHRDLU comes from; if you run your
| fingers down the keyboard vertically, you get that), wait for
| the caster to finish the slug, then discard the slug.
|
| These machines belong to the small set of very complicated
| but mass produced machines of the mechanical era. Very few
| people could do design like that and make it work. A few
| examples:
|
| - Howard Krum - Teletype machine (1920s)
|
| - William Burroughs - adding machines (1895)
|
| - Joseph Brown - automatic screw machine (1865)
|
| There may be a few more, but it's not a long list.
|
| Excellent mechanical design is a rather rare skill. Most of
| the mistakes made by bad programmers have been made in
| mechanical design, but in metal they are more visible. They
| show up as high cost, low reliability, too many parts,
| excessive wear, a need for too tight tolerances or expensive
| materials, and such.
|
| (I restore 1920s-1930s Teletype machines as a hobby, which
| gives some insight into what works in mechanical design.)
|
| [1] https://archive.org/details/0066_Typesetting_Linotype_02_
| 25_...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jP91XowAE
| oriettaxx wrote:
| "I learned two things from the experience: not to invest when you
| can't afford to, and not to invest when you can."
|
| this is the best :)
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| > The remaining two were purchased by the Mergenthaler company in
| 1898, with one being presented to Cornell University and the
| other was to Columbia University. The Columbia machine is
| believed to have been scrapped during World War II as part of a
| wartime scrap metal drive, while the Cornell machine was returned
| to Mergenthaler and later donated to the Mark Twain Home in
| Hartford, Connecticut, where it remains on display to this day -
| the last remnant of a curious and disastrous chapter in the great
| author's life.
|
| I recommend this as a pilgrimage. They have a tour with a very
| fine actress playing his housekeeper, properly researched and
| intelligently done, he would have approved.
|
| The backdrop of this investment is not as simple and pithy as HN
| makes it. Twain was no fool and no gambler.
| rendall wrote:
| Twain was no fool but literally was a gambler.
|
| _" I learned to play poker there, and soon became an adept at
| the game. It was in the little blind hells in Virginia City,
| that the game became riveted upon me, and from that time on I
| seldom played any other game."_
|
| - Mark Twain, Roughing It.
| HopenHeyHi wrote:
| That just sounds like a gentlman being a master of calculated
| risk to me.
| lisper wrote:
| There are lots of videos of Linotypes on YouTube. Really
| interesting stuff. This one is my favorite:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| More like the bad investment that Mark Twain poured excess income
| into.
|
| I know little about Twain's life (other than his having arrived
| and left on Halley's comet) but the tale is illuminating. Despite
| his famed wit and rise to success, perhaps inside he was still
| that poor urchin who had no discipline when it came to his
| unexpected wealth.
| seiferteric wrote:
| Even Isaac Newton gotten taken in the South Sea Bubble. The
| allure of quick wealth, especially when everyone around you
| seems to be doing it can is very powerful.
| Affric wrote:
| You say "even" but for all his genius (gravitation, discrete
| calculus) Newton was a bit of a crank:
|
| 1. Drinking mercury in pursuit of eternal life
|
| 2. Predicting the apocalypse in 2060 (yet to be disproven)
|
| 3. Superstition around the number 7
|
| 4. Attempted alchemy
|
| This is not to say he was more or less superstitious than
| others. Just that extensive expertise in one or even many
| domains does not translate into expertise in all domains.
|
| I think you are onto something with the allure of quick
| wealth. The decision makers at SVB and Credit Suisse were
| paid to be prudent.
| LiquidSky wrote:
| You will find that in the real world people don't fall into
| neat categories of smart and disciplined always making the
| prudent decisions or foolish and undisciplined doomed to
| failure.
|
| It's one of our sillier delusions that being good at one thing
| (say, for a completely random example not relevant at all to
| the Hacker News crowd, programming a computer) automatically
| makes you smart about everything.
| leephillips wrote:
| This would eventually become known as TeX.
| buescher wrote:
| Here's the account in his own words, including the famous quote:
| "Paige and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms, and
| yet he knows perfectly well that if I had him in a steel trap I
| would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he
| died."
|
| https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/mark-twain/the-autobiograp...
| eth0up wrote:
| One of my favorite photographs:
|
| Twain in Tesla's lab
|
| https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Mark...
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Mine too! I made this image based on it and my favorite Twain
| quote from the Innocents Abroad.
|
| https://www.russellbeattie.com/notes/posts/images/twain.png
| eternityforest wrote:
| To me it seems like the problems are all very familiar in modern
| tech.
|
| * Replicating human behavior exactly without really being able
| to(Tesla's missing radars)
|
| * Tinkering and perfectionism driven rewrites (Framework of the
| week webdev)
|
| * Not complexity in general, but in-house complexity that you
| don't have the resources to manage
|
| * Poorly managed originality, doing things other people don't
| understand without making sure to teach people so it's not just
| you who can fix it
|
| * Moving parts
|
| * Investing as an individual in specific things that might
| fail(r/wallstreetbets anyone?)
| tpmx wrote:
| The article is talking about the
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paige_Compositor.
|
| It refers to an 1887 patent application with 218 pages. Here's
| part 1 (specification) at 55 pages:
|
| http://www.archive.org/details/PaigeCompositorUS547860Text60...
| (granted 1895-10-15, that tracks with the 8 year review period
| mentioned in the article.)
|
| And here's part 2 - 163 pages full of lovely mechanical drawings:
|
| https://archive.org/details/PaigeCompositorUS547860Sheets600...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sam Clemens.
|
| Twain is a pseudonym.
|
| The compositor was well ahead of its time, which is one of those
| ways in which your start-up can fail.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| The very first words of the article are:
|
| "Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, .."
|
| Or are you complaining that the HN article should also include
| that information?
| bink wrote:
| This reminded me of a story in Carl Bernstein's book about being
| a newsboy for the Washington Post. He talks about a time when he
| was in the room where they did type setting and someone tricked
| him into touching one of the plates. Because he wasn't a union
| worker the boss threw the whole thing on the ground and told them
| it had to all be redone.
| stevepike wrote:
| I think about this quote sometimes: "It ain't what you don't know
| that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just
| ain't so. " - Mark Twain
| dang wrote:
| Not Twain: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-
| trouble/. But all similar lines get attributed to him or Abe
| Lincoln (who btw never said the thing about fooling all of the
| people some of the time &c.)
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| What does it mean? Can you spell it out for me?
| AndrewStephens wrote:
| Paraphrased: You do not get led into trouble by the totally
| unknown. It is your incorrect beliefs that get you into
| problems.
| aix1 wrote:
| > What does it mean? Can you spell it out for me?
|
| It's not the absence of information that tends to create
| difficulties; rather, it's when you firmly believe in
| something that is incorrect, which can lead to complications.
|
| A real-world example can be found in the story of the
| Titanic, a British passenger liner that sank in the North
| Atlantic Ocean in 1912 after colliding with an iceberg. At
| the time, the Titanic was considered the largest and most
| luxurious ship ever built and was famously referred to as
| "unsinkable." This overconfidence in the ship's safety
| features led to several poor decisions, such as not providing
| enough lifeboats for all passengers and crew members on
| board.
|
| The belief that the Titanic was unsinkable was incorrect, and
| when the ship struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage, it
| sank, causing the deaths of over 1,500 people. In this case,
| it was not the lack of knowledge about shipbuilding or
| navigation that led to the disaster, but the misplaced
| confidence in an incorrect assumption--that the Titanic was
| invulnerable to sinking. This overconfidence contributed to
| the inadequate safety measures and ultimately the tragic
| outcome.
|
| (by ChatGPT; I thought I'd be fun to see what it had to
| offer.)
| mandmandam wrote:
| [dead]
| colineartheta wrote:
| If you don't know something, and know you don't know
| something, you're likely not going to do something bad with
| that information. For example, if you don't know anything
| about engines, you're probably not going attempt to fix one.
|
| But often times we think we know something, and are confident
| that what we know is true, when it really isn't. And that's
| what gets us in trouble. For example, thinking you know
| something about engines, but instead you flood the cylinders
| and require a real mechanic to fix it instead.
| truculent wrote:
| Spoken like a true gambler
| blacksqr wrote:
| Twain lost large amounts of money several times, on bad business
| investments and doomed inventions. He ran through his wife's
| considerable inheritance as well as his royalties, and had to
| keep writing books to make up his losses.
|
| His financial misfortunes were literature's eternal gains.
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