Technology in Mark Twain's Works

Mark Twain once said, “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact” (Mark Twain Quotes). It has been proven in some of Mark Twain’s novels and works he had a passion for science and technology. Mark Twain wrote about the use of technology disrupting society which is shown in his novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, as well as a short story about his typewriter called, The First Writing-Machines, written in his unpublished autobiography. The First Writing-Machines is about Twain and a friend seeing a typewriter in the window of a store. Fascinated, the two go inside where they are astonished to learn how such a machine works. Blown away by the type-girl’s ability to type 57 words per minute, Mark Twain purchased his first typewriter for $125 (The First Writing-Machines).  Mark Twain also wrote a short story titled, A Telephonic Conversation, not long after Thomas Edison dubbed the phrase, “hello?” as the standard greeting when answering a phone call. The short story is entirely a phone conversation, but only one sided. Twain humors the phone conversation between a man and a woman, only being able to hear the man’s questions and replies. Twain writes, “Then followed that queerest of all the queer things in this world– a conversation with only one end of it. You hear questions asked; you don’t hear the answer. You hear invitations given; you hear no thanks in return. You have listening pauses of dead silence, followed by apparently irrelevant and unjustifiable exclamations of glad surprise or sorrow or dismay” (A Telephonic Conversation).  The whole short story makes no sense, it is simply a one sided conversation. It can be argued that because Mark Twain loved technology so much, he found something extremely interesting about the nature of phone calls and the assumptions that can be made from only hearing one side.