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bryanrasmussen 14 hours ago [-]
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.
pikminguy 10 hours ago [-]
THIS! Clemens was financially troubled more than once in his life due to bad investments but that wasn't what broke him. We're talking about a man who outlived 3/4 of his children and the wife he adored!
chaostheory 8 hours ago [-]
Didn’t he blame himself for her death because it supposedly happened because he had to go on the road again in order to pay for his debts?
bryanrasmussen 7 hours ago [-]
I don't know, probably. This kind of thing all goes together and you tend to become very bitter towards people.
kungfooey 7 hours ago [-]
Yes, he was in Europe at the time. Chernow's biography of Clemens, while ridiculously long (audiobook was > 40 hours) was also very good and spent quite a bit of time on this.
I do suspect financial losses were a big contributor -- but part of it wasn't just that he lost _his_ money, but also his wife's inheritance. Of course, even aside from this money-losing invention, they were quite the profligate spenders.
ekelsen 20 hours ago [-]
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?
cheesecakegood 15 hours ago [-]
I was able to do something probably few have, which is visit one of those small hole in the wall museums staffed essentially by just a single passionate old guy assembled with his life savings, dedicated to the printing press. Incredible experience.
Anyways, it’s been about 15 years, but the thing that made an impression on me was that it wasn’t just one invention. Gutenberg basically had to assemble like two dozen separate innovations to make it all work.
The type alloy (3 metals!) had to be just soft enough to cast easily, just expandable enough to set well, just hard enough to last. How to cast in quantity and re-melt as needed. The ink had to be just runny enough to apply easily but not so runny it gets everywhere, sticky enough to stick to type, and dry at a good middle speed. The blotter to apply the ink to type. The system of wooden casing to hold the pieces together with the right spacing, that won’t fall apart. How to set up the casing. The screw press needed to have very even pressure. The paper needed to be able to slide and take ink properly without spreading but also not tear. Proper fonts and ligatures for the type. And so on…
IIRC most things stayed pretty similar for a few hundred years, mostly changing stuff like the paper feeding mechanism or tweaking ink application or minor variations in how the lever or screw work. So to be honest, Gutenberg did almost all the hard work himself. It was a big deal because a lot of these smaller inventions had to come together for a narrow purpose all at once (on top of the obvious huge historical effect of cheaper books!)
afc 14 hours ago [-]
Thank you for taking the time to type that, I found it informative and interesting. Like we like to think of it as a single idea that worked well, but it's actually a ton of work to get a million details just right, and failure in just a few of them would just have made the whole endeavor (of the printing press) fail.
melvinroest 14 hours ago [-]
What small hole in the wall museum was that? I might travel to it no matter where it is in the world. Sounds awesome, I'm hyped up
cheesecakegood 13 hours ago [-]
The Crandall Printing Museum! Yeah he used to do live demonstrations and everything, to the degree where he would cast a type piece right there in front of you from the liquid metal! Super cool guy, crazy knowledge about even tiny details. Sadly the original near-one man show passed away about a decade ago, but apparently the family has some role still in running it (I think the son runs the tours now?) since they just barely saved it all from being shut down and sold off, so it’s still around! https://www.thecrandall.org/collectionhttps://youtu.be/p9ikfO0MHQE if you wanted to get a glance at what they had/have. Even a linotype machine too!
Really fond memories of my visit, you can tell when someone is passionate.
melvinroest 11 hours ago [-]
I once celebrated my birthday where I asked everyone to give the following gift to me: create a presentation or workshop about something you're passionate about in your life. Treat us like experts and go down into your level of thinking, even to the tiniest amount of details. Don't be afraid if we don't fully follow or ask you to explain some terms. I'm hyped to hear what you come up with.
It was such a fun birthday. It was basically a conference, haha.
russdill 14 hours ago [-]
Many of the same technologies enables woodcut presses which already existed.
WalterBright 17 hours ago [-]
Gutenberg's press was made out of a wine press. Letters were cast in lead, then lined up on a tray under the press. The tray was inked. A piece of paper was set over the inked letters, and the wine press forced the paper onto the letters. This cut the cost of a book by a factor of 300(!).
The trouble for Gutenberg was it was too easy to duplicate his press, and that combined with not being good at business led to his bankruptcy.
ymolodtsov 15 hours ago [-]
The paper was still expensive and there wasn't yet as much demand for books.
jhbadger 10 hours ago [-]
And Gutenberg still was shooting for the high-end of the market -- he had his printed Bibles touched up by artists (Illuminated capitals, some color added here and there), meaning his Bibles weren't much cheaper than hand-copied because he believed that nobody wanted just cheap, functional books.
aleph_minus_one 6 hours ago [-]
> I wish school curriculum included things like "how printing actually worked through ages". [...] Everyone is taught the Gutenberg press was a big deal -- but how did it actually work?
Just go to technological museums in cities near you: there you can see and learn all these things.
danso 8 hours ago [-]
That’d be nice, as a news nerd and pagemaker monkey myself. But school curriculums don’t even have the space to teach touch typing anymore. Or huge chunks of U.S. history (nevermind histories of countries far older).
bell-cot 11 hours ago [-]
And at least as important are the surrounding economic, social, and archival systems for printed information. How much of the populace was literate? Was there licensing (for copyists or printers), copyright, public domain, or public libraries? Distribution systems? What sorts of material were being copied or printed? And how long did those materials physically last? My understanding is that there's a vast amount that we don't know about Ancient Rome, because their "paper" was papyrus - cheap and easy to make, but easily destroyed by rot in damp environments and by crumbling in dry environments.
tremon 7 hours ago [-]
All of those considerations are predicated on having the printing press first. There is little value in advanced literacy if written knowledge is rare or hard to come by. There is no need for licensing if verbatim copying takes a lifetime rather than an afternoon. Why would someone need an elaborate distribution system if their output is limited to (let's say) 2 books/year?
bell-cot 6 hours ago [-]
> All those considerations are predicated on having the printing press first.
Not sure what you mean by "advanced literacy", but credible experts seem to put literacy rates in Ancient Rome (zero printing presses) in the neighborhood of 20%. If you consider how little demand (for printed material) there could be from slaves, rural peasants, and such - that's damned high.
You seem focused on books with enormous page counts, requiring 6 months to a lifetime to copy. That's really not how societies without modern (ultra-cheap) printing technology did things. Same as their horse-drawn carriages didn't weigh anywhere near what a modern SUV does.
(Yes, hand-copied Bibles were big. And rare. Are you trying to judge the size and cost of typical medieval buildings by the surviving the cathedrals and castles?)
rcbdev 18 hours ago [-]
In my school curriculum here in Vienna, this was very specifically taught in history class.
ekelsen 18 hours ago [-]
That's really awesome! Did they have you try and typeset something by hand? I feel like for us it presented as some magical thing that made producing books trivially easy, whereas in reality typesetting a page was still very labor intensive and not that fast!
rcbdev 16 hours ago [-]
We learned about how the Gutenberg Press physically worked, how it was based on wine presses and how difficult it supposedly was to produce a single metal letter. Also, how it was a PITA to re-arrange them to print something else, alas it was mostly used to print the Bible.
WalterBright 17 hours ago [-]
The printer setup is where all the cost is, the printing itself is practically free.
ekelsen 6 hours ago [-]
I think even the printing was still not _that_ fast. You needed to physically press down each page. Make sure the ink was right, replace the paper, make sure not to smudge anything, etc.
I'd be surprised if they could average more than 2 pages / minute? Which for 1000 pages is still a full days work.
vee-kay 17 hours ago [-]
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eru 18 hours ago [-]
Most of the things school curricula touch turn awful.
It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.
Retric 17 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of people vastly overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education.
Easier on its own is therefore effectively meaningless when people aren’t actually learning beyond the most superficial layers.
jacobolus 15 hours ago [-]
> overestimate how well they learn things without the feedback of formal education
People benefit greatly from external human feedback, but 1:1 tutoring (with a good tutor) is roughtly an order of magnitude more effective and efficient than a classroom, and classrooms themselves vary wildly; in general the more participatory the better.
Self learning without any help can be more effective and efficient than a typical classroom, because as it is self directed, self paced, can use the best materials someone can find and a whole variety of them vs. whatever was assigned, etc., but it takes a lot of skill (which comes from past practice) and effort on the part of the learner. Many researchers/scholars are doing significant amounts of self-directed learning as their career, and can get very good at it with decades of practice.
The speed of learning in a classroom with 15+ students is inevitably unbelievably slow, and the time is used incredibly inefficiently. This isn't any particular problem with specific teachers, but as far as I can tell an inherent problem with aligning a bunch of people's preparation, motivation, and attention, and a problem with giving feedback in a 1:many setting. Teaching/learning speed generally seems worse at a primary school level vs. at a college level, given a very good teacher in both; I'm not sure if this is because of better prepared (because older) students, or just more motivated students.
Retric 7 hours ago [-]
Formal education is wider than just 15+ people classrooms. Apprenticeships don’t require removing people from the workforce, but they require feedback to function well not just watching a master craftsman.
1 hours ago [-]
abyssin 16 hours ago [-]
It’s not only feedback, having arbitrary checkpoints like exams is an important motivator, and it also creates a whole culture around it that makes the learning experience into a social one.
OroPla 11 hours ago [-]
English is my second language I learned outside of school. Formal education is pretty worthless all around in my experience, as they only tell you what you should learn on your own but make no effort to actually teach you. Otherwise every person leaving school would be fluent in at least two languages.
The most incredulous part is how easy it was to learn English on my own. It took less than two years after having failed to do so with 10+ years in school.
ekelsen 17 hours ago [-]
I know them now, the questions were rhetorical.
I agree that school curricula is often bad. I disagree that we should just accept it as hopeless and not hope it could get better.
eru 17 hours ago [-]
No, no, just the opposite: school curricula are full of lofty highfalutin ideas.
I didn't say anything is hopeless. It's just that adding more good and lofty ideas and topics to the curriculum isn't addressing the actual bottleneck.
LarsDu88 16 hours ago [-]
Yet the end result appears that people on their own accord go and "learn" things like vaccines are bad, fluoridated water is used for mind control, rectal enemas can cure bowel cancer, and that the moon landings were fake.
At least the education system enforces some baseline level of standards
arbuge 20 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Animats 19 hours ago [-]
Actually, no. Replicating the manual process was quite feasible.
There were keyboard-driven typesetters that worked well. Here's the Unitype.[1] This sets type by assembling type slugs into a line. It doesn't cast hot metal. It even has an automatic distribution system; it can sort type slugs by letter, so you can reuse the type. That's the same thing the Paige machine did. The Unitype was much simpler.
The Unitype was late to market. Mergenthaler already had the Linotype out when the Unitype shipped. The Unitype was half the price of a Linotype. Unitype machines sold for about 20 years, so it wasn't a total failure. The Paige machine uses a lot more parts and space to do the same job.
Mechanism design skill is very rare. All the good Teletype machines were designed by just two people - Howard Krum and Edward Kleinschmidt. There were competing machines, and they were all much worse. William Burroughs invented the first adding machine that worked reliably, and it was better than all the competitors. Burroughs dominated banking well into the computer era.
The video claims that the big problem with the Unitype that it required not just a keyboard operator, but someone manually justifying the lines at the output end. Linotype figured out automatic justification, using expanding wedges. No need for a second worker.
Plus someone had to feed used type back into the Unitype for sorting and return to inventory. With a Linotype, the matrices with the letter forms never leave the machine; they are dispensed, set into a line, used for casting, and then immediately recycled back to the magazine for further use. As long as the supply of lead bars ready to melt holds up, you can keep setting type. With ordinary type setting, mechanized or not, you can end up with all your type tied up in pages waiting to be printed.
So the real problem with the Unitype was that it wasn't labor-saving enough.
Despite that, it powered many small country newspapers for years.
> The counterpoint is that what humans already do is exactly what's needed in some cases, making those cases the ideal applications for humanoids.
If my old textbook on control theory (printed in 80s) to be believed, there apparently were quite a lot of processes where simply recording the video of hand/arm movements of the human operators, smoothing the trajectories, and then making the mechanical manipulators simply follow them, was precisely the fastest and cheapest way to automate, compared to trying to reimagine the whole process and rebuild a whole manufacturing line with the newly invented machines.
miki123211 17 hours ago [-]
Humanoids are the Turing machines of physics.
They're Mediocre at everything, and worse than a dedicated machine at almost every task, just like a CPU is worse than an ASIC. However, they adapt to new tasks quickly. This decreases ownership costs (you only need one humanoid, not one machine per task), as well as manufacturing costs, as you can make one design and spend a lot of R&D money on scaling that design.
anon-3988 16 hours ago [-]
There's no reason why an ideal body needs to have such a high center of gravity though? Clearly we are wasting a lot of energy and capacity to maintain that balance.
I am pretty the ideal body is actually a spider.
wongarsu 14 hours ago [-]
Spiders can't reach as high. Unless you make them really big, but then they take up a lot of space
Humans are very space efficient
Joker_vD 13 hours ago [-]
Something vaguely centauroid is probably would be the most middle of the road design: easy to maintain steady balance with 4 legs without taking too much of the floor space, the central column on top of it can go quite high up and easily have up to 4 hand-like manipulators attached to it with wide range of motion.
anon-3988 13 hours ago [-]
The mechanical spider can simply extend its torso or body up. You are only bounded by your imagination!
pineaux 16 hours ago [-]
Actually bipedal systems are very energy efficient when walking and moving and very slightly inefficient when standing still.
The 30 second version, sewing is very labor intensive and people started trying to make a sewing machine from about when manufacturing tolerances got tight enough to attempt the process. It still took about 100 years until machines that actually work well were invented, The genius bit that took so long is to not try and sew like a human does but to develop an inverted process that a machine can do. Honestly, despite being quite common at this point in time sewing machines still blow my mind when you consider the intricate process they are required to do with thread.
And a fun fact for free: Apparently patent cartels(cough MPEG LA) are not a new thing and Singer et al set one up in the 1850's to lock up the market on these marvelous machines.
brianpan 15 hours ago [-]
And the dishwasher, the laundry washer/dryer...
There's also plenty of examples where technology creates something very different than the thing that humans were doing: photograph vs painting, car vs horse/bike. It would be silly to say that we have all this horse infrastructure and saddle UX that we don't want to break compatibility with.
Maybe the lesson is that humans are adaptable but machines/manufacturing is not? It's easier to make a great new thing that humans will use than it is to make a cost-effective production thing that exactly replaces what humans did.
stevekemp 14 hours ago [-]
If you have 30 minutes to spare the old program "The Secret Life of Machines" has an episode demonstrating how sewing machines work, in a delightfully quirky way.
This whole episode suggests to me that people are misjudging the future of robotics. Many companies are building robots to exactly imitate humans, perhaps with the thought that the "egocentric" training data widely available will be more useful for this form factor. Look at Tesla, Unitree, Boston Dynamics, or Figure... But humans are just barely adapted to bipedalism and hunter-gathering as it is.
The perfect kind of robot is perhaps something closer to the linotype... a AI controlled macine that has the capability to birth or re-assemble to be optimal for the task at hand. Just like the linotype automated the "casting" of lines of text.
Not necessarily a 3d printer or a nanobot universal assembler... but maybe something more akin to a modular assembly line that can rearrange itself intelligently.
cestith 9 hours ago [-]
The Inspector Gadget robot, only not necessarily in humanoid form, might be useful. Modular bits it can carry along. As for overall form, a compact and stable form has already come to us in media as well. The astromech droids from the Star Wars galaxy are bipedal / tripodal adaptable so they can be very agile or very stable. To be more adaptable to more terrains, maybe a compact tripodal or quadrupedal stepping robot, or a bipedal one with optional third leg.
bcjdjsndon 5 hours ago [-]
> That would in fact be the main argument against humanoid robots in many (most?) applications.
Buy one robot, use it for many things, is an attractive proposition I think
adrianN 19 hours ago [-]
If you have a general solution like a robot that can do human tasks, i.e. copying manuscripts with a pen, that is often highly inefficient compared to a specialized solution like a printing press but the R&D effort of applying it is minimal compared to inventing a specialized machine.
It's similar with LLMs. Compared to a bespoke piece of software for the task they are incredibly inefficient, yet they are extremely useful because they can do things where developing that piece of software would require a lot of research.
wongarsu 14 hours ago [-]
The counterpoint is that we already exploited a lot of the cases where simplifying the problem helps. We've spent approximately two centuries doing that. That leaves a lot of processes left over where that kind of specialization was either not feasible or not economically attractive
hnchm 19 hours ago [-]
Well, LLMs are a great example of the argument for the power of doing what "humans already do": language, however imperfect for the task, so maybe humanoid robots turn out to be the most natural way to interact with a human environment (broad strokes here, I know, but hopefully you get the gist)
somenameforme 18 hours ago [-]
Another point on this is that as you improve the robot you improve those endless tasks it can do, whereas with specialized robots improvements to that specialization are much more limited in scope. So there's a lot more incentive and value to be gained from improving the tech than there are for specialized solutions. Sike with LLMs.
gofreddygo 14 hours ago [-]
A group of specialized actors with deeper singular skills, working on a task, well coordinated outperform a single actor with wider, shallower skills.
I acknowledge that the depth the group brings is at a cost higher than the single actor and it isn't always a better thing.
m3047 28 minutes ago [-]
"For Twain, though (and one suspects for Paige himself), the dream of mechanically mimicking human actions was what fascinated him most. Twain’s writings... came to see the Paige machine as a “creature” in its own right."
History doesn't repeat, it rhymes.
ricardobeat 8 hours ago [-]
> 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.
toast0 8 hours ago [-]
> Steve Job’s “reality distortion field” was coined after the ability to get people to achieve the impossible and deliver better products;
I was under the impression it was about Steve convincing the faithful that Apple invented the categories of products they sold, rather than simply delivering better products in existing categories.
MPSimmons 8 hours ago [-]
It was coined by Apple engineers who would agree to whatever Steve wanted them to do while Steve was at their desk, and then when he left they'd be distraught over what they'd agreed to.
Hmm, that's basically a fancy way to describe psychological pressure and persuasion.
pwthornton 7 hours ago [-]
No, it was first coined by people who worked for him in the early 80s. He was really trying to push the limits of what was possible and convinced people working under him to do so.
mirmor23 5 hours ago [-]
> 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 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.
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.
edoceo 22 hours ago [-]
Classic angel investor mistake, too much allocated to one investment. Gotta diversify. More smaller checks.
hahahaa 18 hours ago [-]
Yeah wanna write 100k cheques? Better have a net worth of 100M or a way to pool investor money.
brcmthrowaway 16 hours ago [-]
There's definitely someone worth 100M here. Saikat, where are you?
NopIdoN 22 hours ago [-]
I thought this was going to be about Nikola Tesla's vibration machine that made Clemens shit himself
relwin 5 hours ago [-]
Possibly the very first description of the "brown note"?
Mistletoe 22 hours ago [-]
That didn’t ruin his life, merely his shorts.
sarreph 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pydry 10 hours ago [-]
Also treating machines as worker or job substitutes instead of amplifying tools.
I see that mistake made on literally every level from the automation of 15 minute tasks to analysis of the macroeconomic effects of robots and software.
bcjdjsndon 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
And I'd argue that's very generous.
willturman 17 hours ago [-]
Mark Twain himself wrote a story about a sure thing, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County:
Surprised there has not been a biographical drama about Twain on AMC or something.
fwipsy 20 hours ago [-]
It's pretty ironic to read about Twain losing his fortune to bad investments, after satirizing sketchy investments in "The Gilded Age."
thinking_cactus 14 hours ago [-]
It makes a little sense to me that would be the case. People tend to write things they find relevant for their own life or surrounding. That is, he might be putting into paper a kind of warning to himself.
fwipsy 7 hours ago [-]
To me it indicates that he knew how easy it is to lose your shirt, likely from the examples of his peers -- and then he did anyways.
bcjdjsndon 5 hours ago [-]
But he sounded so clever with his quippy little lines... America loves appearances more than the reality
wolfi1 19 hours ago [-]
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
BrenBarn 16 hours ago [-]
As the caption says, it's not even a real photo of Twain or Paige, it's from a movie.
When I heard that story, I couldn't help but thing of Steve Jobs "Real Artists Ship." The device was good but the inventor was a perfectionist instead of an entrepreneur.
foo42 16 hours ago [-]
Side note: The linotype, which Paige's machine is compared to, was one of my favourite machines to discover existed. Such a clever design.
kazinator 21 hours ago [-]
> 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.
xoxxala 21 hours ago [-]
Linotype machines were revolutionary. The New York Times used them for 127 years until 1978 and this documentary shows them in action for the last time:
Lineotype they use lead letters. They use an alloy. There was a lot of lead, but there's also other metals in it because lead is too soft to be useful in a press. The alloy had the interest stream property that it has very low shrinkage when it cooled.
DrewADesign 20 hours ago [-]
Classic letterpress type is lead, antimony and tin, but I don’t know if the so-called hot lead machines used that particular alloy. People usually just call it all “lead type” though.
kazinator 18 hours ago [-]
Classic letter writing is dread, acrimony and gin.
shrubble 17 hours ago [-]
The wedge-shaped expander bars you mention are a brilliant bit of engineering: they deliver perfectly equal spacing across the entire line without any calculation or measurement needed.
EagnaIonat 16 hours ago [-]
> It absolutely isn't. Paige was actually the engineer ...
It glosses over it and Twains autobiography goes into more detail.
What impressed Twain about it was the demonstration had an operator typing at high speed.
When he got the device, he discovered the operator was typing the same phase over and over. They had memorised it so as to type faster.
So one of the overlooked lessons is don't believe product demos.
kazinator 4 hours ago [-]
Being able to type a repeated phrase fast is something; it's better than not being able to.
You want the typist to memorize some test sentences so that they are fast enough to demo what the machine can handle.
However, if the phrase was contrived to be sympathetic to the workings of the machine, that would have been a misleading demo.
dmurray 9 hours ago [-]
A trained operator could have got up to a very high speed anyway, though, as the age of typewriters would show. Even if Paige didn't know that. Having the machine able to keep up is more important than the speed of the typist.
EagnaIonat 4 hours ago [-]
You should read his autobiography
It was not possible to get a high speed as the machine often jammed. IIRC Mark Twain said the machine helped in improving his swearing.
gws 19 hours ago [-]
One lesson to add:
Any investment can go to zero, so better size it accordingly.
dyzone 17 hours ago [-]
Mid cap and large cap mutual funds are pretty safe right?
saidnooneever 18 hours ago [-]
super interesting article thanks never heard of the entire story. uncanny parallels to todays humanlikewritermachines and the billions being lost and won there.
fearmerchant 9 hours ago [-]
He was a writer, he should have stayed in his lane.
tweetle_beetle 8 hours ago [-]
It is well known that all true investors are born with innate instincts for entrepreneurship and do not distract themselves with other careers, skills or knowledge.
cubefox 21 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jrflowers 20 hours ago [-]
Reading about a machine from one hundred and fifty years ago and getting progressively more and more upset that the writing doesn’t give sufficient praise to the real topic of every article, my lovely chat bot
cubefox 16 hours ago [-]
My lovely pocket calculator, he says these are lessons for us, for the present. And, since he is talking about technology in general, presumably for the future. The past events were only the inspiration.
jrflowers 14 hours ago [-]
I don’t think this article about Mark Twain, a famous guy one hundred and fifty years ago, lost all of his money betting on the wrong thing is about chat bots. He lost his money before all that
We will never know if Mark Twain would have or would not have lost his money betting on chat bots because he lost it all on a different machine that didn’t work
cubefox 13 hours ago [-]
> Twain’s vision of hundreds of thousands of human-like language machines taking over the world would have to wait a century or two. (...)
> 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 think there are three transferrable lessons we can pull from this story: (...)
3 hours ago [-]
ninadphalak 10 hours ago [-]
nice article, but how do you think it applies to today's world with AI?
shawkinaw 21 hours ago [-]
> promising the impossible — the 19th century version of Steve Job’s reality distortion field.
Seriously, that’s your best example of that lately? Not, I don’t know, Tesla FSD? Theranos? Bernie Madoff?
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.
I do suspect financial losses were a big contributor -- but part of it wasn't just that he lost _his_ money, but also his wife's inheritance. Of course, even aside from this money-losing invention, they were quite the profligate spenders.
Anyways, it’s been about 15 years, but the thing that made an impression on me was that it wasn’t just one invention. Gutenberg basically had to assemble like two dozen separate innovations to make it all work.
The type alloy (3 metals!) had to be just soft enough to cast easily, just expandable enough to set well, just hard enough to last. How to cast in quantity and re-melt as needed. The ink had to be just runny enough to apply easily but not so runny it gets everywhere, sticky enough to stick to type, and dry at a good middle speed. The blotter to apply the ink to type. The system of wooden casing to hold the pieces together with the right spacing, that won’t fall apart. How to set up the casing. The screw press needed to have very even pressure. The paper needed to be able to slide and take ink properly without spreading but also not tear. Proper fonts and ligatures for the type. And so on…
IIRC most things stayed pretty similar for a few hundred years, mostly changing stuff like the paper feeding mechanism or tweaking ink application or minor variations in how the lever or screw work. So to be honest, Gutenberg did almost all the hard work himself. It was a big deal because a lot of these smaller inventions had to come together for a narrow purpose all at once (on top of the obvious huge historical effect of cheaper books!)
Really fond memories of my visit, you can tell when someone is passionate.
It was such a fun birthday. It was basically a conference, haha.
The trouble for Gutenberg was it was too easy to duplicate his press, and that combined with not being good at business led to his bankruptcy.
Just go to technological museums in cities near you: there you can see and learn all these things.
Not true. Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria Scribes are just lower efficiency, like wood-burning railroad trains vs. horse-drawn wagons.
Not sure what you mean by "advanced literacy", but credible experts seem to put literacy rates in Ancient Rome (zero printing presses) in the neighborhood of 20%. If you consider how little demand (for printed material) there could be from slaves, rural peasants, and such - that's damned high.
You seem focused on books with enormous page counts, requiring 6 months to a lifetime to copy. That's really not how societies without modern (ultra-cheap) printing technology did things. Same as their horse-drawn carriages didn't weigh anywhere near what a modern SUV does.
(Yes, hand-copied Bibles were big. And rare. Are you trying to judge the size and cost of typical medieval buildings by the surviving the cathedrals and castles?)
I'd be surprised if they could average more than 2 pages / minute? Which for 1000 pages is still a full days work.
It's never been easier for you and interested kids to learn these things on their own.
Easier on its own is therefore effectively meaningless when people aren’t actually learning beyond the most superficial layers.
People benefit greatly from external human feedback, but 1:1 tutoring (with a good tutor) is roughtly an order of magnitude more effective and efficient than a classroom, and classrooms themselves vary wildly; in general the more participatory the better.
Self learning without any help can be more effective and efficient than a typical classroom, because as it is self directed, self paced, can use the best materials someone can find and a whole variety of them vs. whatever was assigned, etc., but it takes a lot of skill (which comes from past practice) and effort on the part of the learner. Many researchers/scholars are doing significant amounts of self-directed learning as their career, and can get very good at it with decades of practice.
The speed of learning in a classroom with 15+ students is inevitably unbelievably slow, and the time is used incredibly inefficiently. This isn't any particular problem with specific teachers, but as far as I can tell an inherent problem with aligning a bunch of people's preparation, motivation, and attention, and a problem with giving feedback in a 1:many setting. Teaching/learning speed generally seems worse at a primary school level vs. at a college level, given a very good teacher in both; I'm not sure if this is because of better prepared (because older) students, or just more motivated students.
The most incredulous part is how easy it was to learn English on my own. It took less than two years after having failed to do so with 10+ years in school.
I agree that school curricula is often bad. I disagree that we should just accept it as hopeless and not hope it could get better.
I didn't say anything is hopeless. It's just that adding more good and lofty ideas and topics to the curriculum isn't addressing the actual bottleneck.
At least the education system enforces some baseline level of standards
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.
The Unitype was late to market. Mergenthaler already had the Linotype out when the Unitype shipped. The Unitype was half the price of a Linotype. Unitype machines sold for about 20 years, so it wasn't a total failure. The Paige machine uses a lot more parts and space to do the same job.
Mechanism design skill is very rare. All the good Teletype machines were designed by just two people - Howard Krum and Edward Kleinschmidt. There were competing machines, and they were all much worse. William Burroughs invented the first adding machine that worked reliably, and it was better than all the competitors. Burroughs dominated banking well into the computer era.
The video claims that the big problem with the Unitype that it required not just a keyboard operator, but someone manually justifying the lines at the output end. Linotype figured out automatic justification, using expanding wedges. No need for a second worker.
Plus someone had to feed used type back into the Unitype for sorting and return to inventory. With a Linotype, the matrices with the letter forms never leave the machine; they are dispensed, set into a line, used for casting, and then immediately recycled back to the magazine for further use. As long as the supply of lead bars ready to melt holds up, you can keep setting type. With ordinary type setting, mechanized or not, you can end up with all your type tied up in pages waiting to be printed.
So the real problem with the Unitype was that it wasn't labor-saving enough. Despite that, it powered many small country newspapers for years.
[1] https://youtu.be/5n5JQrN8qx4?t=152
If my old textbook on control theory (printed in 80s) to be believed, there apparently were quite a lot of processes where simply recording the video of hand/arm movements of the human operators, smoothing the trajectories, and then making the mechanical manipulators simply follow them, was precisely the fastest and cheapest way to automate, compared to trying to reimagine the whole process and rebuild a whole manufacturing line with the newly invented machines.
They're Mediocre at everything, and worse than a dedicated machine at almost every task, just like a CPU is worse than an ASIC. However, they adapt to new tasks quickly. This decreases ownership costs (you only need one humanoid, not one machine per task), as well as manufacturing costs, as you can make one design and spend a lot of R&D money on scaling that design.
Humans are very space efficient
The 30 second version, sewing is very labor intensive and people started trying to make a sewing machine from about when manufacturing tolerances got tight enough to attempt the process. It still took about 100 years until machines that actually work well were invented, The genius bit that took so long is to not try and sew like a human does but to develop an inverted process that a machine can do. Honestly, despite being quite common at this point in time sewing machines still blow my mind when you consider the intricate process they are required to do with thread.
And a fun fact for free: Apparently patent cartels(cough MPEG LA) are not a new thing and Singer et al set one up in the 1850's to lock up the market on these marvelous machines.
There's also plenty of examples where technology creates something very different than the thing that humans were doing: photograph vs painting, car vs horse/bike. It would be silly to say that we have all this horse infrastructure and saddle UX that we don't want to break compatibility with.
Maybe the lesson is that humans are adaptable but machines/manufacturing is not? It's easier to make a great new thing that humans will use than it is to make a cost-effective production thing that exactly replaces what humans did.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lwI4TSKM3Y
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elias_Howe#Invention_of_sewing...
The perfect kind of robot is perhaps something closer to the linotype... a AI controlled macine that has the capability to birth or re-assemble to be optimal for the task at hand. Just like the linotype automated the "casting" of lines of text.
Not necessarily a 3d printer or a nanobot universal assembler... but maybe something more akin to a modular assembly line that can rearrange itself intelligently.
Buy one robot, use it for many things, is an attractive proposition I think
It's similar with LLMs. Compared to a bespoke piece of software for the task they are incredibly inefficient, yet they are extremely useful because they can do things where developing that piece of software would require a lot of research.
I acknowledge that the depth the group brings is at a cost higher than the single actor and it isn't always a better thing.
History doesn't repeat, it rhymes.
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.
I was under the impression it was about Steve convincing the faithful that Apple invented the categories of products they sold, rather than simply delivering better products in existing categories.
https://www.folklore.org/Reality_Distortion_Field.html
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.
To see a typecaster which works find a Linotype or Monotype.
https://circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/noncastcom...
The organization used an antique letterpress to print up invitations for weddings and such.
[0] - https://grugbrain.dev/
It was like trying to publish the first draft of your novel without ever having an editor go over it.
I see that mistake made on literally every level from the automation of 15 minute tasks to analysis of the macroeconomic effects of robots and software.
And I'd argue that's very generous.
https://readmeastoryink.com/wp-content/uploads/stories/the_c...
Highly recommend reading.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTiCTFdTd60
It glosses over it and Twains autobiography goes into more detail.
What impressed Twain about it was the demonstration had an operator typing at high speed.
When he got the device, he discovered the operator was typing the same phase over and over. They had memorised it so as to type faster.
So one of the overlooked lessons is don't believe product demos.
You want the typist to memorize some test sentences so that they are fast enough to demo what the machine can handle.
However, if the phrase was contrived to be sympathetic to the workings of the machine, that would have been a misleading demo.
It was not possible to get a high speed as the machine often jammed. IIRC Mark Twain said the machine helped in improving his swearing.
We will never know if Mark Twain would have or would not have lost his money betting on chat bots because he lost it all on a different machine that didn’t work
> 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 think there are three transferrable lessons we can pull from this story: (...)
Seriously, that’s your best example of that lately? Not, I don’t know, Tesla FSD? Theranos? Bernie Madoff?