Mark Twain was the first person to publish a book that was written on a typewriter.

Arts & Culture

"I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in his house," Mark Twain once claimed, adding that he was also "the first person in the world to apply the typemachine to literature." The author born Samuel Clemens was indeed the first to publish a book written on a typewriter, though he may have misremembered which one it was — Twain recalled it being The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but it was more likely 1883's Life on the Mississippi, according to typewriter historian Darryl Rehr. Twain didn't type the book on a typewriter himself, however — he handwrote it and the manuscript was later typed.

The typewriter in question was a Remington 2, which the company later told the public about as part of a marketing campaign. In an advertisement published in Harper's, Remington published a letter that Twain wrote, in which he made this observation about the emerging technology: "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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By the Numbers

Years it took Twain to write The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Year the Remington 2 was introduced

1878

Did you know?

Many quotes are misattributed to Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was responsible for many words of wisdom but not all of the quotes attributed to him. Though there's no unified theory as to why the Tom Sawyer author gets credited with so many quips he wasn't actually responsible for, it seems reasonable to assume that words of wisdom carry more weight in the collective imagination when attributed to someone famous for their wit and insight. "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics," after all, although Twain didn't originate that famous saying, as is often suggested, nor did he ever observe that "it is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." Fittingly, however, the author did offer this definition of a "classic," though he attributed it to English professor Caleb Thomas Winchester: "a book which people praise and don't read."

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