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A Pioneering Author. One of its first buyers was Mark Twain. "I believe it will print faster than I can write," he typed. "It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around." But sales were not helped by people who mistook typed letters for printed circulars, nor by those who indignantly protested that letters did not have to be printed for them, they "could read writin'!" Nonetheless, by the time Promoter Densmore died in 1889. he had built an estate worth about half a million dollars on the writing machine. Unfortunately, Inventor Sholes sold his rights before the profits poured in.
Today, 80 years after the first Remington appeared, the typewriter has become inescapable. A U.S. battleship, notes Reporter Bliven, requires 55 typewriters on board as it meets the enemy, and when the army advances, there are "more [typewriters] within 4.000 yards of the front lines than medium and light artillery pieces combined." In typewriter ribbons and carbons alone, the volume of business in the U.S. is almost $50 million. Not even Promoter Densmore had ever imagined that the "literary piano" would make music like that.