nters in
the world put together.

His letter to Orion was more technical, also more jubilant. At the end
he said:

All the witnesses made written record of the immense historical
birth--the first justification of a line of movable type by
machinery--& also set down the hour and the minute. Nobody had
drank anything, & yet everybody seemed drunk. Well-dizzy,
stupefied, stunned.

All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty
nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical
miracle. Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton-gins, sewing-
machines, Babbage calculators, jacquard looms, perfecting presses,
all mere toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone and
far in the land of human inventions.

In one paragraph of Orion's letter he refers to the machine as a
"cunning devil, knowing more than any man that ever lived." That was
a profound truth, though not as he intended it. That creation of
James Paige's brain reflected all the ingenuity and elusiveness of
its creator, and added something on its own account. It was discovered
presently that it had a habit of breaking the types. Paige said it was
a trifling thing: he could fix it, but it meant taking down the machine,
and that deadly expense of three thousand or four thousand dollars a
month for the band of workmen and experts in Pratt & Whitney's machine
shops did not cease. In February the machine was again setting and
justifying type "to a hair," and Whitmore's son, Fred, was running it
at a rate of six thousand ems an hour, a rate of composition hitherto
unknown in the history of the world. His speed was increased to eight
thousand ems an hour by the end of the year, and the machine was
believed to have a capacity of eleven thousand. No type-setter invented
to this day could match it for accuracy and precision when it was in
perfect order, but its point of perfection was apparently a vanishing
point. It would be just reached, when it would suddenly disappear,
and Paige would discover other needed corrections. Once, when it was
apparently complete as to every detail; and running like a human thing,
with such important customers as the New York Herald and other great
papers ready to place their orders, Paige suddenly discovered that it
required some kind of an air-blast, and it was all taken down again and
the air-blast, which required months to invent and perfect, was add