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 over 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.
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