It was 9 feet long, weighed 3 tons, and had 18,000 parts. Its 109-character keyboard was arranged so that entire words could be assembled by the operator in one stroke, using all fingers of both hands. At the end of each word, a word key was struck; at the end of each line, a line key was struck. While the operator continued to key in words, the words and lines were assembled in metal type, measured automatically, and spaces of the proper thickness were automatically inserted to create justified columns. The machine would automatically reject broken type.

The history of the Paige typesetting machine, which in its final form was named the Paige Compositor after the inventor and patentee, is an interesting story of capitalistic greed, printing automation, and engineering evolution, concentrated on the complex problems of selecting, composing, distributing, setting and line-justifying movable type.

The application for the Compositor was filed in 1887 and spent eight years under examination by the Patent Office. One of the examiners died while the case was pending, another died insane, and the patent attorney who originally prepared the case also died in an insane asylum (John S. Thompson in “History of Composing Machines”).

James W. Paige, a native of Rochester, NY, developed his typesetting machine in 1873 and took it to the Farnham Typesetting Manufacturing Co., located in the Colt Arms Factory in Hartford, CT. In 1879 Mark Twain met Paige, saw plans for his machine and bought $2,000 worth of stock in Farnham. A year later Paige developed a printing telegraph, which was successful, and Twain became Paige’s biggest supporter, paying $2,000 a month to keep Paige at work, even using the first royalties received from the publication of ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ Clemens said: ‘We only need one more thing, a phonograph on the distributor to yell, “Where in H— is the printer’s devil, I want more type.”

The Paige compositor was specially designed for newspaper work, and used nonpareil type (about 6 point); the distributing, setting, justifying, and leading mechanisms were adjustable to any width of column desired for newspaper or even book work. About $800,000 was spent on the engineering, experimentation, production, and patent work for the two Paige machines manufactured. Twain invested at least $200,000 of his own money, which is often blamed for bringing him to bankruptcy in the mid 1890s. The Clemenses closed their Hartford home and headed overseas in 1891 so that Twain could make money on the lecture circuit.

The Mergenthaler Linotype Company had offered to exchange half interests with the proprietors of the Paige machine, but Paige would not accept the offer. During the years of delay as Paige tinkered away, Mergenthaler secured the field and was able to fix the price of the typesetting machine at a lower price than the Compositor could sell for. The Mergenthaler offer had indicated to Twain that his Paige machine was a sure winner.

In a test of the Paige machine at the Chicago Herald, the Compositor outperformed 32 Linotype machines. But Linotype’s promoters outperformed Paige and Twain. Only two of the complicated Paige machines were produced as Paige kept technical details to himself and never fully trained technicians. His endless tinkering with the machine lost critical time to Linotype, which was introduced in 1886. There were 55 Linotype machines in operation in 1887, just two years before the Paige machine was completed. By 1895, there were 1,076 Linotypes in operation and they had become standard newspaper equipment.

Henry H. Rogers, a founder of Standard Oil, assumed the management of Twain’s troubled finances, He had Twain bail out of the Paige machine in 1894. Rogers said the machine was everything Twain said it was, but that it was still a bad investment. Twain needed every penny to repay the creditors of his bankrupt publishing firm. Twain spent four years lecturing throughout the world and finished paying his debts by 1900.

In 1981, a group of engineering and management students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA, studied the only remaining Paige typesetter and the mechanical drawings for the machine. Students and professors agreed: the Paige typesetter worked very well, but it just came too late to overtake the marketing success of the Mergenthaler Linotype which had become the industry standard. The Linotype just took over the market and dominated the typesetting industry for the next 80 years.

In the 1940 movie with Frederic March as Twain, he takes his wife to see the machine. Hollywood found the Compositor too dull, so they invented what looked like a musical organ with mechanical arms that came out the back with giant tweezers at the end of each (Edward Tweezerhands?). The actor playing Paige plays the organ and the arms move to trays of hand type and the tweezers pick the type up and place it in another tray. A loud “clunk” signals a problem and the inventor takes a hammer to the mechanism at which point he is bitten by the tweezers. Twain’s wife asks “Is this what we’re putting all our money into?”

In 1895, Linotype acquired the only two Paige machines. One was displayed at the Mergenthaler home office in Brooklyn, NY. In 1957, Mergenthaler was absorbed into a conglomerate called Eltra Corp., and later we were told to discard all the machines in the museum on the first floor of 29 Ryerson Street. The machine was given to the Twain Museum in Hartford, CT. An engineering association paid to move it. The other Paige machine had been given to Columbia University and it was junked in 1942 in a World War II scrap metal drive. Paige moved to Chicago in 1892 and fell into poverty. He died in 1917.