Being an early adopter can come with a price. I once bought a used car that was from the first year of an exciting new model. I eventually realized that this fact explained why it was so cheap- the bugs hadn't been worked out. Around the year 1880, Mark Twain met a man who had built a machine that would set type automatically, replacing the time-consuming job of a compositor, who had to find and set every letter of a printed page. The machine was called the Paige Compositor, which is not a misspelling because it was named for inventor James W. Paige.
The machine resembled something out of The Jetsons, with mechanical arms that did the selecting and typesetting. Twain knew this could revolutionize publishing, and invested substantially in the machine's development. But history tells us that merely replacing a human worker's moves is not as revolutionary as finding a new way to get to the end product. The story of the Paige Compositor also shows us that the people behind a new technology must be evaluated as well as the product.
(Image credit: Scientific American)
