Paige offered to borrow from Clemens the amount needed, offering the machine as security.  Clemens supplied the four thousand dollars, and continued to advance money from time to time at the rate of three to four thousand dollars a month, until he had something like eighty thousand dollars invested, with the machine still unfinished.  This would be early in 1888, by which time other machines had reached a state of completion and were being placed on the market.  The Mergenthaler, in particular, was attracting wide attention.  Paige laughed at it, and Clemens, too, regarded it as a joke.  The moment their machine was complete all other machines would disappear.  Even the fact that the Tribune had ordered twenty-three of the linotypes, and other journals were only waiting to see the paper in its new dress before ordering, did not disturb them.  Those linotypes would all go into the scrap-heap presently.  It was too bad people would waste their money so.  In January, 1888, Paige promised that the machine would be done by the 1st of April.  On the 1st of April he promised it for September, but in October he acknowledged there were still eighty-five days’ work to be done on it.  In November Clemens wrote to Orion: 

The machine is apparently almost done—­but I take no privileges on that account; it must be done before I spend a cent that can be avoided.  I have kept this family on very short commons for two years and they must go on scrimping until the machine is finished, no matter how long that may be.

By the end of ’88 the income from the books and the business and Mrs. Clemens’s Elmira investments no longer satisfied the demands of the type-setter, in addition to the household expense, reduced though the latter was; and Clemens began by selling and hypothecating his marketable securities.  The whole household interest by this time centered in the machine.  What the Tennessee land had been to John and Jane Clemens and their children, the machine had now become to Samuel Clemens and his family.  “When the machine is finished everything will be all right again” afforded the comfort of that long-ago sentence, “When the Tennessee land is sold.”

They would have everything they wanted then.  Mrs. Clemens planned benefactions, as was her wont.  Once she said to her sister: 

“How strange it will seem to have unlimited means, to be able to do whatever you want to do, to give whatever you want to give without counting the cost.”

Straight along through another year the three thousand dollars and more a month continued, and then on the 5th of January, 1889, there came what seemed the end—­the machine and justifier were complete!  In his notebook on that day Mark Twain set down this memorandum: 

Eureka!

Saturday, January 5, 1889-12.20 P.M.  At this moment I have seen a line of movable type spaced and justified by machinery!  This is the first time in the history of the world that this amazing thing has ever been done.  Present:  J. W. Paige, the inventor; Charles Davis, | Mathematical assistants Earll | & mechanical Graham | experts Bates, foreman, and S. L. Clemens.  This record is made immediately after the prodigious event.

Two days later he made another note: