Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

This is a story about love and hate. The protagonist is Mark Twain. The object of his desire and then

resentment is the typewriter.

Twain first laid eyes on a newfangled typing machine, as he called it, sometime in the early 1870s.

He was, by then, on his way to becoming the world's most famous writer and humorist.

Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer.

At the same time, the tools of writing were undergoing a profound transformation,

from fountain pens with their leaking and smudging ink

to the pleasant sound of tapping a key whose corresponding letter was magically stamped

to paper.

This new technology did not emerge with the speed of a tweet.

According to an IBM history of the typewriter,

one of the first American attempts at producing such a machine

looked very much like a butcher's block,

and unfortunately performed

with about the same delicacy. Christopher Latham Scholes, who was ultimately the first American

to build a typewriter like the ones we no longer use today, was stymied early on when the only

key he could get to work was W.

But by 1871, when Twain laid eyes on a Remington and a Boston store,

the machines were somewhat reliable, at least according to salesmen.

Twain and a friend were given a demonstration.

Twain later recalled,

...