And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean -
Ah, lean upon it lightly! for who knows
From what once lovely lip it springs unseen!
FitzGerald
Where have all the flowers gone, long time ago?
Peter, Paul and Mary
The Paige Compositor
The Convergence Of The Twain
Life on the Mississippi

Another garden story. Something about the riddle of life, about the sources of fertility, and cycles of regeneration.

In our own near-past the successes of behavioral biology, cognitive social psychology, evolutionary game theory, and paleoanthropology have contributed to the widespread development and acceptance of “scientism” defined by Alex Rosenberg as an often exaggerated confidence in scientific methods and their application outside of what would prove to be their appropriate domains. And this, most especially in regards to questions commonly treated by the humanities. Note though that the walled gardens of Omar and Edward were conductive to philosophical musings aside from religious purpose although neither poet could yet admit outright the possibility that science might be the only reliable way to secure knowledge of anything.

“Scientism could have reached the conclusion that there are no purposes or designs in the brain without any help from neurolinguistics, behavioral biology, or evolutionary anthropology. There are no purposes or designs in nature. Newtonian physics banished them from reality. Darwinian biology explained away their appearance everywhere. That has to go for our brain as much as for any other physical thing in the universe. Scientism is already committed to a purpose-free mind. It’s the job of the neurosciences to explain how the brain produces such a beautiful appearance of purpose without its reality.”

Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality

Through Omar and Edward Victorian England and America and eleventh century Persia (and today’s Iran) are sensing the first stirrings of awareness that the “packaged” information of organized religion amounts to little more than stories, although the stories endure.

We are suckers for a good story- a description of events in the form of a plot with characters driven my motives. If information doesn’t come in story form, we have trouble understanding it, remembering it, and believing it. Unfortunately for real science (and for science writers!), its real explanations never come in the form of stories. Luckily for religion, it almost always comes in the form of stories. So religion has a huge psychological advantage in the struggle to convince people of the answers to the relentless questions.

Science has three things going for it that religion doesn’t have. First, the facts that make any story true, when it is true, are to be found in equations, theories, models and laws. Second, most of religion’s best stories are false. Third, and most important, science shows that the stories we tell one another to explain our own and other people’s actions and to answer the persistent questions are all based on a series of illusions. That should be enough to forestall our innate penchant for stories.

Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality

X

Mark Twain's Investment in The Paige Compositor

The Paige Compositor was an automatic–typesetting machine invented by James W. Paige. Little is known about the inventor of the Paige Compositor. James W. Paige was born in upstate New York in January 1842. While living in Rochester, he applied for his first patent on a typesetter in 1872, and the patent was granted in 1874. He then moved to Hartford between 1874–77 to work for the Farnham Type–Setter Company, which was trying to put together a workable typesetter by combining the gravity-fed Farnham machine with the Thompson distributor. The Farnham Type–Setter Company rented space for about five years at the Colt Firearms factory. The rest of Paige's life centered around the Paige Compositor, trying to market it and make it work. Paige eventually died in the poorhouse, but no one knows where or when.

Twain's love for technology and his background in printing led him to invest in the compositor. Between 1880 and 1894 he invested a fortune into its development, resulting in his near bankruptcy. In an 1889 letter to his brother Orion, Twain writes,

"All the other inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplaces contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle. Telephones, telegraphs, locomotives, cotton gins, sewing machines, Babbage calculators, Jacquard looms, perfecting presses, Arkwright's frames – all mere toys, simplicities! The Paige Compositor marches alone & far in the lead of human inventions."

Though the Paige Compositor was faster than the Linotype, its 18,000 parts were prone to malfunction. Paige's invention exhibited superior technological achievement, but its price and temperamental nature made it unattractive to a business world that had already embraced the Linotype. Still, it is regarded today as one of the finest examples of nineteenth century mechanical engineering.

The Clemenses closed their Hartford home and headed for Europe in 1891, in part because of the financial strain of Twain's unprofitable investment.

Overall Dimensions:

18,000 moving parts made the compositor a complicated machine When Mark Twain first saw the compositor, it could set type four times faster than by hand –about 3,000 "ems" (the common measure for a typesetter) an hour versus 750 by hand. At the end of his involvement it could set type at 12,000 ems/hour, or 16 times faster than by hand. Two working models were made but, after failing in pre–production tests, the Paige typesetter never went into production.

One model was given to Columbia University, which later donated it to the scrap metal drive during World War I. The other model was at the Cornell University Museum from 1894–1897. The Mergenthaler Company bought this compositor for $20,000 in 1897. This machine (now the only one in existence) was originally loaned to the Mark Twain House in 1958 by the Mergenthaler Linotype Company of Brooklyn, NY. They donated the machine in 1964.

It was installed as a single unit in the basement of the Mark Twain House on December 17, 1958. (It has never been taken apart for fear that its 18,000 moving parts could not be put back together again.)

Twain's initial $2,000 investment occurred around 1880. He inspected the machine as it was being built by Paige at Colt's Patent Firearms factory in Hartford. After seeing the machine perform, he invested an additional $3,000 in stock. Twain wrote to Charles Webster on Oct. 26, 1881 that the $5,000 was "...best investment I ever had. I want an opportunity to add to it -- that is how I feel about it."

On July 28, 1885, he wrote again to Charles Webster about getting a company in Boston to make and hire out machines at $2,500 each. He thought that eight machines would "do the New York Sun's work and reduce its composition bills from $80,000 per year to $25,000."

In 1885, Paige asked and received from Clemens an additional $30,000 to make additional improvements to the machine to automatically justify lines. They moved the machine to Pratt & Whitney so Paige could work on it.

y 1887, with the $30,000 gone and competition from the Mergenthaler Linotype (in use at the New York Tribune), Paige sought additional capital. Clemens, fearing he'd lose all of his money if he withdrew, put $3,000 to $4,000 a month into Paige's typesetter. By 1888, Twain had invested $80,000 and Paige was constantly saying that the machine would be ready in 2–3 weeks.

On January 5, 1889, the machine worked for the first time, but soon broke down and had to be fixed. In 1890, a group of prospective customers came to see a demonstration of the machine. Nevada millionaire Senator J.P. Jones was ready to invest $100,000, if the machine worked as well as promised. It collapsed as the potential investors arrived.

Between 1890–91, Twain invested at least $4,000 a month until in 1891, he finally called an end to his involvement in funding of the Paige Typesetter. Twain estimated that his entire investment was around $150,000; his biographer A.B. Paine set the figure closer to $190,000, and William Dean Howells estimated $300,000.

In June 2003, The Mark Twain House & Museum purchased a manuscript, ca. 1880-90, in which Twain tried to calculate the most economical use of the typesetting machine to be used by his publishing company and a newspaper. He estimated that the machine would have to be in use for almost 24 hours a day in order to afford having it.

X
The Convergence Of The Twain
by Thomas Hardy

(Lines on the loss of the "Titanic")

I
In a solitude of the sea
Deep from human vanity,
And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

II

Steel chambers, late the pyres
Of her salamandrine fires,
Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres.

III

Over the mirrors meant
To glass the opulent
The sea-worm crawls--grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent.

IV

Jewels in joy designed
To ravish the sensuous mind
Lie lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind.

V

Dim moon-eyed fishes near
Gaze at the gilded gear
And query: "What does this vaingloriousness down here?". . .

VI

Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything

VII

Prepared a sinister mate
For her--so gaily great--
A Shape of Ice, for the time fat and dissociate.

VIII

And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

IX

Alien they seemed to be:
No mortal eye could see
The intimate welding of their later history.

X

Or sign that they were bent
By paths coincident
On being anon twin halves of one August event,

XI

Till the Spinner of the Years
Said "Now!" And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.

This paper explains that "The Convergence of the Twain" by Thomas Hardy reflects mankind's over confidence in ship building. The author points out society's arrogance reflected in the luxury and extravagance that the Titanic symbolized in her wreckage. The paper relates that in the sinking of the Titanic, Hardy presents a metaphysical yet morally challenging idea of human achievement in sea faring history.

homas Hardy's poem "Convergence of the Twain" is an alternative perspective on the loss of the "Titanic" in April, 1912. The poem's major ideas concern the vessel, its state, and symbolic significance two years after the collision, and a speculation on how the iceberg came to converge with the ship. Hardy is very interested in affiliating the growth and fate of the iceberg and ship through the deification of nature and time. The first five stanzas of the poem concern the submerged ship itself, while the last six discuss its fate while afloat.

In the first five stanzas, Hardy's descriptions of the Titanic are consistently juxtaposed against the ship's present environment to emphasize the waste of money, technology, and craftsmanship. The furnaces of the ship, which contained "salamandrine fires" (5), now have "Cold currents thrid" (6) through them. Where there was once heat and life driving the engines of the ship, there is now coldness and death. A further juxtaposition within this second stanza is the use of the word "pyre" (4), as it connotes funerals and death, while the use of "salamandrine" insinuates a certain tenacity for life (as salamanders were said to live through fires) that could be associated with the Unsinkable Ship everyone believed the Titanic to be before accident.

Hardy further emphasizes the waste of the ship's magnificence by describing how useless the "opulent mirrors" are to uncomprehending sea-worms that are "grotesque, slimed, dumb, indifferent" (9). The jewels on board the ship, now at the ocean's floor, become "lightless, all their sparkles bleared and black and blind" (12). The poet's use of multiple adjectives and alliteration intensifies the somber nature of these descriptions. The items that Hardy has chosen in his poem to embody the loss of the ship (the cold furnaces, bleared mirrors, and lightless jewels, rather than the loss of life) are indicative of his attitude towards the ship and what it stood for.

The Titanic was not simply a ship built to traverse the ocean; it was a symbol of the wealth, power, and industrialization of Britain during this time. The items which appear in Hardy's poem are representative of the power, wealth and vanity of the British nation. Hardy's discussion of these items, rather than the more glaring issues of death and human suffering normally associated with the loss of the ship, would seem to indicate his disdain for the pride and importance that his contemporaries placed upon scientific and technological progress.

Hardy's discussion of the Titanic shifts in stanza six to address the cause of the disaster. His use of enjambment between the sixth and seventh stanzas seems to be a technique employed to represent not only the coming together of the iceberg and ship in the poem, but also their literal collision. Hardy's use of deification for both nature and time in the last six stanzas contribute to the ominous and fated quality of the Titanic disaster. Hardy suggests that the Titanic converging with the iceberg was not a coincidence, but rather an event planned by an "Immanent Will" (18) and "The Spinner of the Years" (31); inferring the ship had been destined for destruction since its inception. The eighth stanza, perhaps the most ominous of the poem, outlines how the ship and iceberg grew to their completion concurrently, "as the smart ship grew / In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too" (22, 24). Hardy uses words such as "mate" (19), "intimate welding" (27), and "consummation" (33) to emphasize the apparent predestination that these two behemoths seemed to have, and to imply a wedding or sexual union of those mighty opposites.

Although he does not indicate implicitly that he believes in the powers he names, Hardy weaves these deifications into the poem to create a desired effect. The powers are not portrayed as benevolent or merciful as the Christian God would be, but rather they are the cause of this disaster. It would seem that Hardy is telling his audience that humanity, no matter how progressive we may become, will always be at the whim of nature, which has no feeling or care. We are not able to rise above or control a monolith such as the sea regardless of how far our progress has taken us. Knowing the Titanic disaster then, according to Hardy, should be a constant and humbling reminder of humanity's fallibility.

X
From: Life on the Mississippi
By Mark Twain

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too.

I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!

I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me.

*   *   *

A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.

I stood like one bewitched.  I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home.

*   *   *

But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion:

This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark.

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat.

*   *   *

Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay?  Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?