The Strange Tale of a Type-Writer

I HAD a favorite type-writer — I will not say of whose manufacture — with which, through much use of it, I became very intimate. That expression I use boldly, because everybody knows already that many among modern machines have a definite character, and that even individual character is observed in those of the same sort. The engine-driver, for example, will tell you that each locomotive of a lot made to be precisely similar will be found to have, so to speak, its own temperament and manner, and that he becomes attached to his own engine as to a person. So my type-writer became to me individual, and even intelligent. It had moods, captious or sunny, and sometimes it seemed even humorous. And as for intelligence, even before the really wonderful thing happened that I am about to relate, I had from time to time a strange though slight feeling that the machine was acquiring that faculty; that the currents of thought passing through it were stimulating its powers, developing its slight individuality, and making orderly its fitful, irregular motions of quasi-intelligence. The machine, through much speaking, seemed to be learning to think. In what I may call its highest moments, it seemed to meet or even to anticipate my action; outrunning the pressure of my fingers, and recording sometimes, as I thought of its own motion, the next following letter — not always the designed one, but never, I believe, a letter which, taken with the preceding ones, failed to spell correctly some word, though, perhaps, not the word that I intended. These appearances I took for accident compounded with idle whimsies of my mind, since naturally I did not suspect the truth. But at last, when the type-writer had been for a good period in very hard use, and had acted, I know, more than ever as if it had a daemon of its own, I was compelled to leave town for a few days. On my return, coming into my house with the comfortable feeling which possesses one always on getting again among his own belongings after any absence, it was, perhaps, the indulgence of this feeling, as I made my way after a few minutes toward my work-room, that at first hindered me from noticing a slight clicking sound, which, however, presently became clearly audible. Upon entering the first of two rooms, the second of which was the work-room, it was plain to me that some person was at work on my beloved type-writer — a vast impertinence, since the rule of the house was that no hands but mine should touch it. But my vexation did not make me incautious. I advanced across the room too quietly to afford notice of my approach, and looked through the half-open door into the interior apartment. I know myself to be very steady in face of danger — the presence of anything to be done or to be avoided is a tonic to me — and I am as far removed as most men from craven fear, but I should not like to feel again the cold sensation that came upon me when I discovered nobody in the room, and nothing peculiar, save the type-writer working diligently by itself. I should mention, before I go any farther, that just before my departure I had been experimenting with an invention of mine which is intended to obviate the necessity of stopping to change the sheets of paper when one has reached the bottom of a page. It will be evident that I cannot go into particulars on this invention, as I have not yet secured the patent, and I might by so doing lose the reasonable certainty of becoming at least a United States Senator in a few years by a judicious use of the large fortune which I shall, no doubt, have poured into my hands when the patent has been once acquired. Suffice it to say, then, that before being summoned away, I had arranged a number of sheets of paper in my type-writer, all ready for a little novelette which I had planned after the old style of fairy stories, and I had already written the words, “Once upon a time,” when the telegram which called me away was put into my hand. My papyro-positor, as it is to be called, was not attached to the machine when it began to write, and consequently the sheets had not been gathered up as they would have been had that been the case, but had dropped off as they were written, and were lying loosely scattered on the floor and the table, just where they had happened to fall as they had reeled off from the type-writer