We've all read the story about how Mark Twain claimed to have been "hoodwinked" into buying a Sholes & Glidden - in his case, if I recall rightly, the rapidly repeated phrase was "The boy stood on the burning deck". Twain later, apparently, tried to exchange the S & G with William Dean Howells for a horsewhip, but did swap it with Frank Bliss for a $12 saddle. And there are similar stories about how May Estelle Munson mesmerised potential buyers by typing the same words over and over when demonstrating the Blickensderfer 5 at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Anyway, in the same vein, but from across the Atlantic ...
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