The Authority of the Spoken Word: Speech Acts in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Abstract

To begin, then, the operator makes a dart at the keys with both hands; a word instantly appears in the raceway before him; it came from the channels under the glass, but too quickly for anyone to see how it was done. The machine takes the measure of that word, automatically, and then passes it along to the front tooth of the long comb; it measures the next word and the next, and passes them to the comb-teeth; and so on and so on, stringing the words along the raceway about three inches apart until the operator touches the justifying bar; by this time the machine has exactly determined what kind of spaces are required in that line, and as the procession moves past the space-sash, the proper spaces emerge and take their places between the words, the completed line is then gently transferred to the galley by automatic mechanisms, and the thing regarded for four centuries and a half as an impossibility is accomplished. And no spacing by hand could be so regular, no justifying by hand could be so perfect. The Paige typesetting machine, Justin Kaplan observes, could work four times as fast as a human printer, set whole words at a time, space words, and justify its own margins‐‐when it was working (1966:282-88). But unfortunately the miracle machine’s time had not yet come. Samuel Clemens’ investment in the Paige compositor began with two thousand, then five thousand dollars and continued, Albert Bigelow Paine noted in his introduction to Mark Twain’s Autobiography (Twain 1924:78), until it reached a total of about $190,000. According to his own account, in which he refers to his caution as that of a “burnt child” (1939:232), Twain passed up a chance to invest in Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, an invention for which the time had come, because he had no illusions about the capability of an invention of man to carry the sound of the living voice. For him this required physical travel and speaking in person to large, enthusiastic audiences. As he tells this part of his own story, “the lecturing raid around