Movabale letter types in a type case. This centuries-old method of type setting, although largely displaced by newer technologies, is still used by many niche publishers. Credit: Willi Heidelbach/Wikimedia Commons
The late 19th century saw a massive boom in newspaper publishing, especially in cities like New York, Chicago, and London. Rising literacy rates, rapid urbanization, and cheaper paper all contributed to a surge in public demand for daily news. To keep pace, newspapers had to print faster and in greater volume, placing immense pressure on compositors who still set type by hand.
The traditional hand-setting process was laborious and time-consuming. A compositor assembled each page character by character, using small metal letters known as sorts. These were stored in individual compartments on a tray, or type case, in front of the compositor. Working from copy, the compositor would pick up each character in sequence and place it into a composing stick, usually held in the left hand. Once a line of text was complete, it was justified by adjusting the spacing between words so that both the left and right margins aligned evenly.
Several such lines were assembled and locked together in a frame to form a page or form. This form was placed in a press, inked, and pressed onto paper to produce a printed impression. After printing, the type had to be cleaned and carefully redistributed by hand into the correct compartments for reuse.
Manual typesetting was not only laborious, it was slow, expensive and required skilled workers. As the demand for newspapers and other printed material grew, the slow pace of hand-setting could no longer keep up with the printing needs of the modern world, and that created fertile ground for technological experimentation. Among the many ambitious attempts that emerged in this era was the Paige Compositor, a machine of extraordinary complexity designed to replace human typesetters altogether.
The machine’s inventor was a New Yorker named James W. Paige, who, while working in the oil fields, conceived the idea of a mechanical typesetter. The first machine was built in Rochester and a patent applied for in 1872. This first typesetter served as a simple beginning for the massive Compositor that evolved in the two successive decades. In its final form, the Paige Compositor fully automated the process of typesetting, closely mimicking the actions of a human typesetter.
The Paige Compositor. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The machine was operated by a keyboard, much like a typewriter. When the operator pressed a key, a complex mechanical system retrieved the corresponding piece of metal type from a magazine containing thousands of individual characters. The selected type was then dropped into a composing channel, one character at a time, to form a line of text.
Once a full line was assembled, the machine automatically justified it by adjusting the spacing between words to ensure proper alignment on the printed page. Justification required subtle and precise mechanical movements to distribute space evenly, something human typesetters did intuitively, but which demanded sophisticated engineering in a machine. This automatic justifier was the invention of Charles E. Davis, a mechanical engineer who also oversaw the construction of the Paige Compositor.
One of the machine’s most ingenious features was its ability to return the used type to the correct compartments in the magazine after printing, automating a task that was typically done by hand.
Keyboard of the Paige Compositor. Credit: circuitousroot.com
Around 1880, Mark Twain met James Paige and became personally acquainted with him. Paige was a brilliant and persuasive inventor who impressed Twain with the machine’s complexity and potential. Twain, who had a well-documented fascination with modern inventions, was captivated by the Compositor’s elegance, speed, and promise. In Paige’s machine, he saw a golden opportunity. He envisioned it being adopted by every major newspaper and printing house, rendering manual typesetting obsolete, just as the cotton gin had revolutionized textile manufacturing.
Twain, known for his tendency to back impractical inventions (including a steam generator, a steam pulley, and marine telegraphy), poured $300,000 of his own money into the Paige Compositor, equivalent to $8–10 million today.
With Twain and a few other investors footing the bill, Paige set about improving the machine. A relentless perfectionist, Paige was never satisfied with merely adequate performance and constantly tinkered with the design. On one occasion, Twain invited a millionaire and potential investor to view the machine in Paige’s workshop, only to find it disassembled—Paige had taken it apart to install an air blast. This obsessive need to refine and improve the machine delayed its completion by four years.
By the time the Paige Compositor was ready, it had already been overtaken by a competing invention—the Linotype. Unlike the Paige machine, which used mechanical arms to assemble individual pieces of type into words and sentences, the Linotype cast entire lines of type from molten metal, making it faster, simpler, and more practical for commercial use.
Twain was aware of these developments but he still believed Paige’s machine was superior. He continued to fund its development and wrote extensively about its virtues, touting the enormous savings publishers would enjoy once it was adopted.
Linotype, the machine that replaced movable type and killed the Paige Compositor, seen at the Chicago Defender newspaper in April 1941. Credit: Wikimedia Commons
When the Paige Compositor was finally released in 1889, it made little impact on the publishing world. At the time, newspaper and commercial printing associations were still evaluating the pros and cons of mechanical typesetting. While the Paige machine impressed some with its speed, others noted that it could only set one size of type—a significant limitation in a dynamic printing environment.
In 1891, the American Newspaper Publishers Association (ANPA) organized a typesetting contest to evaluate the capabilities of various composing machines. Paige was invited to participate, but his machine was still not ready. The results of the contest ended up favouring linecasting machines as the most suitable "for ordinary newspaper work."
Eventually, after much persuasion, the Chicago Herald agreed to test the Paige Compositor for sixty days in 1894. During the trial, problems quickly emerged— type began to break, and breakdowns became more frequent and time-consuming. With over 18,000 parts, the machine was so complex that only Paige himself knew how to repair it. It soon became clear that the Compositor was too delicate and intricate for the demands of the printing trade, especially in fast-paced newspaper settings, where durability and ease of maintenance were critical.
This scene from the 1944 movie “The Adventures of Mark Twain” depicts the inventor (played by Francis Pierlot) demonstrating to Mark Twain (played by Fredric March) a funny-looking machine with a crane-like mechanism.
With the failure of the machine, the company dissolved having sunk close to $2 million of investor’s money over a period of more than fifteen years. James Paige spent much of his later life in obscurity. By the time of his death in 1917, he was impoverished and living in the poorhouse in Oak Park.
Mark Twain lost a fortune in the Paige debacle, eventually forcing him to declare bankruptcy. He then embarked on extensive lecture tours and writing projects, which allowed him to repay his creditors, despite having no legal obligation to do so.
Despite decades of work and heavy investment only two machines were ever built. One is now on display at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. The other was donated to Cornell University but was later scrapped during World War II.
References:
# “Mark Twain, James. W. Paige and the Paige Typesetter”, www.twainquotes.com
# Corban Goble. “Mark Twain's Nemesis: The Paige Compositor”, ERIC
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