er again--with the same result always: she won
out. She did her work on narrow slips of paper, and we pocketed them as
fast as she turned them out, to show as curiosities. The price of the
machine was one hundred and twenty-five dollars. I bought one, and we
went away very much excited.

At the hotel we got out our slips and were a little disappointed to find
that they contained the same words. The girl had economized time
and labor by using a formula which she knew by heart. However, we
argued--safely enough--that the FIRST type-girl must naturally take rank
with the first billiard-player: neither of them could be expected to get
out of the game any more than a third or a half of what was in it. If
the machine survived--IF it survived--experts would come to the front,
by and by, who would double the girl's output without a doubt. They
would do one hundred words a minute--my talking speed on the platform.
That score has long ago been beaten.

At home I played with the toy, repeated and repeating and repeated "The
Boy stood on the Burning Deck," until I could turn that boy's adventure
out at the rate of twelve words a minute; then I resumed the pen, for
business, and only worked the machine to astonish inquiring visitors.
They carried off many reams of the boy and his burning deck.

By and by I hired a young woman, and did my first dictating (letters,
merely), and my last until now. The machine did not do both capitals and
lower case (as now), but only capitals. Gothic capitals they were, and
sufficiently ugly. I remember the first letter I dictated, it was to
Edward Bok, who was a boy then. I was not acquainted with him at that
time. His present enterprising spirit is not new--he had it in that
early day. He was accumulating autographs, and was not content with
mere signatures, he wanted a whole autograph LETTER. I furnished it--in
type-written capitals, SIGNATURE AND ALL. It was long; it was a sermon;
it contained advice; also reproaches. I said writing was my TRADE,
my bread-and-butter; I said it was not fair to ask a man to give away
samples of his trade; would he ask the blacksmith for a horseshoe? would
he ask the doctor for a corpse?

Now I come to an important matter--as I regard it. In the year '74 the
young woman copied a considerable part of a book of mine ON THE MACHINE.
In a previous chapter of this Autobiography I have claimed that I was
the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in the hous