The Pomera is almost the perfect portable typing device: A four inch grayscale display, a fold-out, full-sized keyboard, twenty hours of battery life from a couple of AAAs, a CR2 coin-sized ...

This contraption is an early “index machine,” which uses a dial rather than a keyboard to choose letters. To work this device, you lift the bar on top to guide the Y-shaped indicator to the ...

Twain first laid eyes on a “newfangled typing machine," as he called it, sometime in the early 1870s. He was, by then, on his way to becoming the world’s most famous writer and humorist.