A machine that bankrupted Mark Twain

This is something that is very true.

You say "even" but for all his genius (gravitation, discrete calculus) Newton was a bit of a crank:

1. Drinking mercury in pursuit of eternal life

2. Predicting the apocalypse in 2060 (yet to be disproven)

3. Superstition around the number 7

4. Attempted alchemy

This is not to say he was more or less superstitious than others. Just that extensive expertise in one or even many domains does not translate into expertise in all domains.

I think you are onto something with the allure of quick wealth. The decision makers at SVB and Credit Suisse were paid to be prudent.

That just sounds like a gentlman being a master of calculated risk to me.

That wasn't the problem. It was that it really was a type setting machine. The Mergenthaler Linotype is a type casting machine - it casts metal slugs with one line of text. The brass matrices from which the type is cast are reused within a minute or two. The matrices have a set of binary coded notches on the top which allow them to be sorted automatically. With type setting, you don't get the letters back until you're done printing, and so you need huge supplies of type, which has to be sorted after use. Linotype slugs just get melted down for the next go-round.

Here's how a Linotype works.[1] There are more popular videos, but this training film gets across how the machine really works.

The article mentions the Linotype being slower than the Paige compositor. That was probably true of early Linotype machines. Later machines added more concurrency. From pictures of the early machines, it looks like there's only one assembly and casting station. The typist could get ahead of the caster and have to wait for it to finish. That was quickly fixed once they had some operational experience. In later machines, it's an assembly line - the matrices are assembled into a line, moved to a holding station by the assembly elevator, and then moved to a casting station when the caster is free. With that buffering, the typist doesn't have to wait for the caster.

Roughly the same design was used for over eighty years, with only minor changes. Which is surprising, considering how bulky the machine is and how clunky the design looks.

The only real competition was from Monotype, which also made a line caster, but with a completely different approach.[2] Monotype machines have a keyboard and paper tape punch as the input device. The caster, a separate machine, has a paper tape reader. It's more compact than a Linotype, but the caster, which casts one character at a time, is slower, at about 3 chars/second. So a big shop might need more casters than keyboard units.

Amusingly, the Monotype caster reads the paper tape in reverse. This allows the typist to "backspace" and cancel the previous character or line from the keyboard, since the caster sees the cancel before starting work on the line. On a Linotype, to correct an error, you have to finish out the line (this is where ETAOIN SHRDLU comes from; if you run your fingers down the keyboard vertically, you get that), wait for the caster to finish the slug, then discard the slug.

These machines belong to the small set of very complicated but mass produced machines of the mechanical era. Very few people could do design like that and make it work. A few examples:

- Howard Krum - Teletype machine (1920s)

- William Burroughs - adding machines (1895)

- Joseph Brown - automatic screw machine (1865)

There may be a few more, but it's not a long list.

Excellent mechanical design is a rather rare skill. Most of the mistakes made by bad programmers have been made in mechanical design, but in metal they are more visible. They show up as high cost, low reliability, too many parts, excessive wear, a need for too tight tolerances or expensive materials, and such.

(I restore 1920s-1930s Teletype machines as a hobby, which gives some insight into what works in mechanical design.)

[1] https://archive.org/details/0066_Typesetting_Linotype_02_25_...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8jP91XowAE

Possibly. From the article it sounds like the first customer was unable to maintain the machine because it was so complicated, and had to get the Paige guy on-site to keep it running, that sort of thing isn't viable for mass production.

> What does it mean? Can you spell it out for me?

It's not the absence of information that tends to create difficulties; rather, it's when you firmly believe in something that is incorrect, which can lead to complications.

A real-world example can be found in the story of the Titanic, a British passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in 1912 after colliding with an iceberg. At the time, the Titanic was considered the largest and most luxurious ship ever built and was famously referred to as "unsinkable." This overconfidence in the ship's safety features led to several poor decisions, such as not providing enough lifeboats for all passengers and crew members on board.

The belief that the Titanic was unsinkable was incorrect, and when the ship struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage, it sank, causing the deaths of over 1,500 people. In this case, it was not the lack of knowledge about shipbuilding or navigation that led to the disaster, but the misplaced confidence in an incorrect assumption—that the Titanic was invulnerable to sinking. This overconfidence contributed to the inadequate safety measures and ultimately the tragic outcome.

(by ChatGPT; I thought I'd be fun to see what it had to offer.)

If you don’t know something, and know you don’t know something, you’re likely not going to do something bad with that information. For example, if you don’t know anything about engines, you’re probably not going attempt to fix one.

But often times we think we know something, and are confident that what we know is true, when it really isn’t. And that’s what gets us in trouble. For example, thinking you know something about engines, but instead you flood the cylinders and require a real mechanic to fix it instead.

Paraphrased: You do not get led into trouble by the totally unknown. It is your incorrect beliefs that get you into problems.