A machine that bankrupted Mark Twain(todayifoundout.com)
todayifoundout.com
A machine that bankrupted Mark Twain
https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2023/03/the-machine-that-bankrupted-mark-twain/
35 comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To understand Newton, you must know he was not the first scientist, rather he was the last alchemist.
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.
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.
This is something that is very true.
This would eventually become known as TeX.
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
Spoken like a true gambler
What does it mean? Can you spell it out for me?
Paraphrased: You do not get led into trouble by the totally unknown. It is your incorrect beliefs that get you into problems.
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.
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.
> 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.)
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.)
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.)
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.
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.
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?
"Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, .."
Or are you complaining that the HN article should also include that information?
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.
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.
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.
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
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
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
That just sounds like a gentlman being a master of calculated risk to me.
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...
https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/mark-twain/the-autobiograp...
Another line:
"In one contract he got me to assign to him several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of property ... said valuable consideration being the regiving to me of another piece of property which ... already belonged to me! I quite understand that I am confessing myself a fool; but that is no matter, the reader would find it out anyway as I go along."
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...
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...
“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 :)
this is the best :)
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.
[deleted]
One of my favorite photographs:
Twain in Tesla's lab
https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Mark...
Twain in Tesla's lab
https://cdn8.openculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Mark...
[deleted]
There are lots of videos of Linotypes on YouTube. Really interesting stuff. This one is my favorite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MGjFKs9bnU
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?)
* 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?)
His financial misfortunes were literature's eternal gains.