FLEET-FINGERED TYPIST
The Dea ex Machina of the Twentieth Century and Her Forerunners
By Mary Badger Wilson
[The following is a short excerpt from the original article.]
In was in 1867 that Christopher Latham Sholes made his first crude writing machine (which he himself christened "typewriter"), and by 1873 he had so far perfected the instrument that the Remington firm of gunmakers undertook to market it. There are still in existence copies of one of the original catalogues, a quaint publication containing the following "testimonial" from Mark Twain:
Hartford, March 19, 1875
Gentlemen:
Please do not use my name in any way. Please do not even divulge the fact that I own a machine. I have entirely stopped using the Type-Writer, 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 that I own this curiosity-breeding little joker.
Yours truly,
Saml. L. Clemens
The first typed manuscript ever submitted to a publisher was one of Mark Twain's masterpieces.
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