by Mark Twain
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 a 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 1871—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 or the next.
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 a 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 all contained the same words. The girl had economised 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 this girl’s output without a doubt. They would do a hundred words a minute—my talking-speed on the platform. That score has long ago been beaten.
At home I played with the toy, repeating and repeating and repeating “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, mainly,) 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-machine 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 ’73 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 his house for practical purposes; I will now claim—until dispossessed—that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” I wrote the first half of it in ’72, the rest of it in ’73. My machinist type-copied a book for me in ’73, so I conclude it was that one.
That early Boston machine was full of caprices, full of defects—devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of to-day has virtues. After a month or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. He was reluctant, for he was suspicious of novelties and unfriendly towards them, and he remains so to this day. But I persuaded him. He had great confidence in me, and I got him to believe things about the machine that I did not believe myself. He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.
He kept it three months, and then returned it to me. I gave it away twice after that, but it wouldn’t stay; it came back. Then I gave it to our coachman, Patrick McAleer, who was very grateful, because he did not know the animal, and thought I was trying to make him wiser and better. As soon as he got wiser and better he traded it to a heretic for a side-saddle which he could not use, and there my knowledge of its history ends.
By means of a painstaking and rigidly accurate mathematical computation I find that the typewriter and the telephone, taken together, are worth more to the human race than twelve hundred and sixty-one battles and seventeen hundred and forty-two thousand barrels of blood. These figures have been examined by the mathematical authorities of Harvard and Yale universities, and found to be correct.
Two months ago it was my good fortune to assist at another bloodless historical birth: on New Year’s Eve, at midnight, that extraordinary invention, the telharmonium, had its first experience in uttering music in a private house, and the house was mine. The utterance was clear and sweet and strong, and it broke upon the ears of the assembled company as a weird and charming surprise; there being no musical instruments in sight, they could not guess whence it came. It was brought over the telephone wire from three miles away, and it ushered in the New Year in a very moving and eloquent fashion.
The present plant cost only two hundred thousand dollars, yet with it it is proposed to furnish music, both night and day, to as many as twenty thousand subscribers at the phenomenally cheap rate of five dollars per month. It is claimed that within a few years nearly every person in Christendom will have this music in his house. If this shall turn out to be true, the telharmonium must take rank as educator and benefactor above all the great inventions so far produced by the human mind, excepting the movable types and the printing-press. I hold it a high distinction for me that it did its first home-work in my house.
The other day this cablegram appeared in the papers:
WILLIAM WHITELEY SHOT DEAD
* * *
LONDON’S “UNIVERSAL PROVIDER” KILLED IN HIS STORE.
* * *
By a Man Calling Himself His Son, Who Afterward Shot Himself—Family Doesn’t Know Assailant—Panic Among Shoppers—Whiteley’s Rise as a Merchant.
Special Cable Despatch to THE SUN.
LONDON, Jan. 24.—William Whiteley, known as “The Universal Provider,” who established the great department store in Westbourne Grove, the first of its kind in London, was shot dead this afternoon by an unidentified man, who afterward attempted to commit suicide.
Mr. Whiteley was in his store, when the man, who was well dressed, entered and insisted on seeing him. The two men had a heated interview, which ended by Mr. Whiteley threatening to call the police. As he turned to reenter his office his assailant fired twice from a revolver into the back of Mr. Whiteley’s head and then shot himself in the forehead, falling across his victim’s body.
This interested me, because I had known Mr. Whiteley a little in years gone by. He was a very remarkable man. His death has called out several interesting communications in the newspapers, both here and abroad. I will insert one of them here:
WHITELEY, UNIVERSAL PROVIDER
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How He Found a Wife for an Anglo-Indian Official in London on Furlough.
To the Editor of The Sun—Sir: With reference to the death of the great dry goods prince in London, Mr. William Whiteley, I should like to relate an incident which came under my own
observation when I was in India many years ago. It was Mr. Whiteley’s boast that you could get anything in his store, from a pin to a plough, and he endeavored to live up to his position as a “universal provider.” In the ’70s there was a civil officer in the Central Provinces who occupied the position of a commissioner, or chief civil officer of a division, and consequently he was prominent socially.
During a furlough in England he had patiently looked for a wife, but had not succeeded. When he was about to return to India he went to Whiteley’s store and made some large purchases; and as he was leaving the store Mr. Whiteley accosted him and asked if he had found everything he wanted. The commissioner replied: “Yes, Mr. Whiteley, you have thoroughly supplied me with everything I want but one article, which it will be impossible for you to find.” “Don’t be so sure of that, sir!” replied the merchant. “State your wants, sir, and they shall be supplied.” “Well, Mr. Whiteley, I am in search of a wife, and I scarcely think you can supply that article.” Mr. Whiteley said: “Indeed I can. A young lady has just become a saleswoman in one of our departments, and she is altogether too highly educated and too refined for such a position. She is a clergyman’s daughter and has been left an orphan. If you will allow me, I will introduce you to her, and I will take care that she does not know about the bargain!”
The commissioner went to the department and was introduced to the young lady, of whom he made large purchases. The result was that he eventually asked her to become his wife. They were married in due time and went to India. During my residence this lady was the leader of society in one of the divisions of the Central Provinces. It is said that after the marriage, and before he left England, the commissioner called on Mr. Whiteley and told him of his success, and asked how much was to pay. “Oh,” he replied, “that is con amore. Simply a labor of love!”
ANGLO-INDIAN.
Mr. Whiteley is mentioned in a chapter of this Autobiography which I wrote in London seven years ago. I will bring it forward to this place.
Dollis Hill House, London, 1900. I spent eleven months in England, ending with June, ’97; spent July, August and September in Weggis, Switzerland; spent twenty months in Vienna; then a month and a half in London, (1899); then two and a half months in the village of Sanna, Sweden; returned to London at the end of September, 1899, and have now been a detail of the world’s metropolis for the past twelve months. By help of these now-and-then glimpses of London, I am able to realize that in some ways she undergoes changes, and that in many ways she doesn’t.
In these latter ways she is what one must call—not slow, not sluggish, for those are not polite words—but conservative. Conservative is one of the most courteous and delicate words the etiquette-book contains. The telephone remains at about the stage in England which it had reached four years ago, from all I can see. In other enlightened countries one is hourly moved to use that handy servant, but not in England. In London, telephones are scarcer than churches. Perhaps it is because the service is substantially a monopoly in the hands of the Postal Department—a Department which is supernaturally and even superstitiously conservative.
If there is argument that the telephone is a great nuisance fifty-nine minutes in the hour, there is still no getting around the fact that in the remaining minute it is generally able to offset that bad record with a shining service which shall amply justify its right to exist. In my experience, life without the telephone is hampered, obstructed and difficult. Dollis Hill House comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I have ever occupied. But it has no telephone, and that has sometimes made life in it a biting aggravation. There has never been a telephone in it. How did the occupant get along without it? I do not know; it is a riddle to me. Mr. Gladstone used to be a frequent guest of its owner a month or two at a time, and we know that he was able to superintend the Empire without it. It looks incredible. He used to sit in the shade of the trees, and read, talk, translate Homer, pace the lawn, and take his rest in serenity and comfort—all without a telephone. And yet there were times—times of upheaval in India or South Africa or some other corner of the Empire—when it was necessarily a heavy strain upon him to have to wait for news from Downing street per messenger, and he must have privately wished he had a telephone. We know that he did govern the Empire from Dollis Hill House without a telephone—that is, he did it as well as he could, in the circumstances, and also with tranquillity—but it would have made another man sweat blood. But was he always really tranquil within, or was he only externally so—for effect? We cannot know. We only know that his rustic bench, under his favorite oak, has no bark on its arms. Facts like this speak louder than words.
In England nothing is just as it is anywhere else. Dollis Hill House is not situated as is any other house on the planet. It is within a biscuit-toss of solid London; yet it stands solitary on its airy hill, in the centre of six acres of lawn, and garden, and shrubbery, and heavy-foliaged ancient trees; and beyond its wire fences the rolling sea of green grass still stretches away on every hand, splotched with shadows of spreading oaks in whose black coolness flocks of sheep lie peacefully dreaming. Dreaming of what? That they are in London, the metropolis of the world, Post-Office District N.W.? Indeed no. They are not aware of it. I am aware of it, but that is all; it is not possible to realize it. For there is no suggestion of city here; it is country, pure and simple, and as still and reposeful as is the bottom of the sea.
It will remain as it is. It, with the surrounding country, has been bought for a park, to be for all time a memorial to Mr. Gladstone, and two years from now the park will be thrown open and made free to the people.
No telephone. Twelve minutes’ walk to the brick-and-mortar mass of London, thirty-five minutes’ drive with a single horse to Piccadilly—and no telephone. But it is of no use to struggle with miracles, as a rule—some of them cannot be accounted for; raising the dead is one, and this is another. It gives us much discomfort sometimes. For instance, Whiteley serves us. Whiteley is one of those people, found only in London, I believe, who serve both cities and empires. His nearest establishment, on our side of London, is miles away. We can’t telephone him, we can’t telegraph him, we must do everything by letter—and give him a day and a half in which to fill the order. Our nearest telegraph office is two miles away, the postoffice which attends to our mails is further, the postman comes to us but twice a day—9 a.m., and 5 p.m. A letter sent to our pillar-box at any hour in the evening up to 11, will reach Whiteley next morning, but not earlier. Whiteley will send out the things next day at 1 p.m., per wagon. He will send you anything you want: a bishop, a cook, a cow, a kangaroo; set of furniture; beef, ham, butter, ice, any breed of eatable or drinkable the globe affords; an orchestra, a nigger show, a banquet, with table-ware, flowers, waiters, after-dinner speakers; a bride, a groom, bridesmaids, groomsmen, wedding-clothes, bridal presents; cradle, cat, dog, doctor, rat-poison, rats, whetstone, grindstone, tombstone, hearse, corpse—anything you want; but you must get your order to him a day and a half in advance, to make sure. And then the trouble begins! One or two articles are lacking, and they may be essentials of the last essentiality. It may be a bishop, it may be a ham; but whatever it is, it is nearly sure to be the very thing you most want. The driver has brought a list, and the missing thing is in it. Where is it, then, personally? He says he has brought everything that was given him; and washes his hands of the whole matter. By and by the week’s bill comes, and in it the missing article is charged. The correspondence begins, now. You write Whiteley and say the missing article never arrived. Whiteley answers courteously that he will make inquiry. In time comes another letter: he has inquired of the driver, who is positive that he delivered everything that was given him. He has next inquired of the Head of the Ham Department—or of the Head of the Ecclesiastical Department, according to the nature of the missing link—who says he knows by the fact that the article is in the list, that he delivered it to the driver. That settles it. You have witnesses, Whiteley has witnesses—two on a
side; but the court sits at Whiteley’s, not at your house. So you pay. That is, Whiteley attends to that, himself; you have to keep a cash deposit with providers of his magnitude.
Next time, these proceedings are repeated; with the same result. You pay. The third time, it all happens as before. You pay. Then you give it up. After that, you enter no complaints, but pay the whole list, missings and all, and say no word. That is our experience. Why don’t we go elsewhere? Because there isn’t any elsewhere to go. Whatever you succeed in getting of Whiteley is up to standard; and while that is also the case with other world-providers like Harrod’s and the Army and Navy Stores, their delivery-wagons do not come outside the cab limit, and we are as much as a hundred yards outside, I should say. Whiteley seems to be the only world-provider who provides everything on earth except a protection for his own repute and for his customer’s pocket. The others will deliver to you no detail of your order without a signed receipt. It looks like obvious common sense. How Whiteley, without that rational little check, has been able to keep his gigantic business successfully flourishing all these years is to me a wonderful thing, another English miracle. Once we sent a hymn-book, or a corkscrew or some such furniture to the Army and Navy to be tinkered up and put in going order, and a month later we were going to have an entertainment and noticed that it was missing. The servants said they had not seen it since it went to the Army and Navy. I went over and laid the disaster before the presiding Admiral, and he rang up the responsible person, and did it just as calmly. He was not fluttered in the least; he knew he could find that thing. The responsible person brought his book, and exhibited his entries for May; whereby it appeared that on the 24th the missing article was received and repaired, and was dispatched by post three days later. The Admiral rang up a tracer and set him on. The tracer traced the article through the postoffice and into the responsibility of a maid in our house. “Oh, that,” she said; “yes, I remember about it, now; I know where it is.” And she produced it. Whiteley would not have found it, here at Dollis Hill House, for he would have had no check upon our cook. It is my belief that our cook stole all those missing articles that we have been paying Whiteley for—or at least her fair share of them. Whiteley’s system is calculated to make thieves of cooks and drivers—in fact is bound to do it.