nton insult of Old Age."

THE FIRST WRITING-MACHINES

From My Unpublished Autobiography

Some days ago a correspondent sent in an old typewritten sheet, faded by
age, containing the following letter over the signature of Mark Twain:

"Hartford, March 10, 1875.

"Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge that
fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the typewriter,
for the reason that I never could write a letter with it to anybody
without receiving a request by return mail that I would not only
describe the machine, but state what progress I had made in the use of
it, etc., etc. I don't like to write letters, and so I don't want people
to know I own this curiosity-breeding little joker."

A note was sent to Mr. Clemens asking him if the letter was genuine
and whether he really had a typewriter as long ago as that. Mr.
Clemens replied that his best answer is the following chapter from his
unpublished autobiography:

1904. VILLA QUARTO, FLORENCE, JANUARY.

Dictating autobiography to a typewriter is a new experience for me, but
it goes very well, and is going to save time and "language"--the kind of
language that soothes vexation.

I have dictated to a typewriter before--but not autobiography. Between
that experience and the present one there lies a mighty gap--more than
thirty years! It is sort of lifetime. In that wide interval much has
happened--to the type-machine as well as to the rest of us. At the
beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person
who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about:
the person who DOESN'T own one is a curiosity. I saw a type-machine for
the first time in--what year? I suppose it was 1873--because Nasby was
with me at the time, and it was in Boston. We must have been lecturing,
or we could not have been in Boston, I take it. I quitted the platform
that season.

But never mind about that, it is no matter. Nasby and I saw the machine
through a window, and went in to look at it. The salesman explained it
to us, showed us samples of its work, and said it could do fifty-seven
words a minute--a statement which we frankly confessed that we did not
believe. So he put his type-girl to work, and we timed her by the
watch. She actually did the fifty-seven in sixty seconds. We were partly
convinced, but said it probably couldn't happen again. But it did. We
timed the girl over and ov