Dictating autobiography to a typewriter is a new experience for me, but it goes very well, and is going to save time and “language”—the kind of language that soothes vexation.
I have dictated to a typewriter before—but not autobiography. Between that experience and the present one there lies a mighty gap—more than thirty years! It is a sort of lifetime. In that wide interval much has happened—to the type-machine as well as to the rest of us. At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn’t own one is a curiosity.
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Now I come to an important matter—as I regard it. In the year ’73 the young woman copied a considerable part of a book of mine on the machine. In a previous chapter of this Autobiography I have claimed that I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in his house for practical purposes; I will now claim—until dispossessed—that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” I wrote the first half of it in ’72, the rest of it in ’73. My machinist type-copied a book for me in ’73, so I conclude it was that one.
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By means of a painstaking and rigidly accurate mathematical computation I find that the typewriter and the telephone, taken together, are worth more to the human race than twelve hundred and sixty-one battles and seventeen hundred and forty-two thousand barrels of blood. These figures have been examined by the mathematical authorities of Harvard and Yale universities, and found to be correct.