Free flight?

[Kramer]

I have seen no signs of any sort of action about anything from you. Just a hateful, racist doofus that hurls stupid insults. Bug off, Kramer.

you must like racists, you voted for Obama afterall!

[Plane]

He has a point there though.

Almost anyone can be an investor in interesting technology.

It can be risky or rewarding , I lost about half of what I invested in the Iridium satellite .


Mark Twain invested in typewriters , but he bet on the wrong ones.

Investors lubricate progress , but they loose some lube in the process.

[Xavier_Onassis]

Twain did not invest any serious amount of money in typewriters, though he was the first major writer to compose on one. He invested a fortune in the Paige typesetting machine, which actually worked, but tended to break down and was hard to fix when it did. Twain was a typesetter for a number of years before he worked on the River.He lost a lot of money when his books were pirated, and wanted to produce a high-quality, distinct and superior book. He also wanted to prevent the sale of typesetting machines to pirates. The Paige machine was a bit like that first computer:too many parts. It was never ready for prime time and he lost most of his money on it. He was forced to go on the lecture circuit to pay his bills. He spent a lot of time in Europe giving speeches. He paid off all his creditors and was again prosperous at the time of his death in 1910.

[Plane]

Twain did not invest any serious amount of money in typewriters, though he was the first major writer to compose on one. He invested a fortune in the Paige typesetting machine, which actually worked, but tended to break down and was hard to fix when it did. Twain was a typesetter for a number of years before he worked on the River.He lost a lot of money when his books were pirated, and wanted to produce a high-quality, distinct and superior book. He also wanted to prevent the sale of typesetting machines to pirates. The Paige machine was a bit like that first computer:too many parts. It was never ready for prime time and he lost most of his money on it. He was forced to go on the lecture circuit to pay his bills. He spent a lot of time in Europe giving speeches. He paid off all his creditors and was again prosperous at the time of his death in 1910.

True and to Samuel Clemonts these were losses.

In another sense the money was not wasted, his support helped the experiments and exploration happen that led at last to the more successfull technology.

[Xavier_Onassis]

I once read a biography on Twain that explained the problem: the Paige typesetter was so trouble-prone because it tried to imitate a human typesetter, picking each letter as it was typed in. The important fact about the Paige was that it proved that typesetting could not be done easily with this approach. Instead, entire blocks were cast of molten lead alloy and fitted into page frames. This has since been replaced with lithography, which uses a photographic image of the page, a far more simpler process. So all that a lithographer needs is "camera-ready" copy.

The Paige typesetter tried to duplicate the human typesetting process robotically in a time when machines were truly dumb. Lithography is based on the differing properties of oil and water. Basically the Paige told everyone that ther was no solution down the road to robotic typesetting. Odds are that with computers, a flawless Paige typesetter would be possible. But litography is so much cheaper, there is no need to even try to build one.

If copyright laws had been enforced, Twain would have never needed to bother with a typesetter.

[Amianthus]

They're moving to digital offset printing now. Lower print volumes are as cheap to produce as higher print volumes in decades past. You'll find more information about it if you google "print on demand".