Twain was never made president of the new Hartford Accident Insurance Company, although he did serve on its board of directors. Established to compete with Traveler’s, the new company was the brainchild of John Percival Jones, a “big-hearted man with ninety-nine parts of him pure generosity,” as Twain described him. Jones had struck it rich in the Comstock Lode and now represented Nevada in the U.S. Senate. A man of far-flung business interests, Jones was a founder of Santa Monica, California, and built the first railroad linking that city with Los Angeles.
Assured by Jones’s business associates that Twain could not possibly lose any money on the investment, Twain purchased $50,000 of stock in the Hartford Accident Insurance Company and attended every board meeting for a year and a half. He was also an eager spokesman for the company—what today we might call a passionate “brand ambassador.” At a dinner for other Hartford businessmen in October 1874, for example, Twain spoke on behalf of the entire industry:
Certainly there is no nobler field for human effort than the insurance line of business—especially accident insurance. Ever since I have been a director in an accident-insurance company I have felt that I am a better man. Life has seemed more precious. Accidents have assumed a kindlier aspect. Distressing special providences have lost half their horror. I look upon a cripple now with affectionate interest—as an advertisement.
Poetry had lost its allure, Twain discovered; he no longer found politics interesting. “But to me now,” he said, “there is a charm about a railroad collision that is unspeakable.”
As for the Hartford Accident Insurance Company, Twain described it as “an institution which is peculiarly to be depended upon. A man is bound to prosper who gives it his custom. No man can take out a policy in it and not get crippled before the year is out.”
UNFORTUNATELY, the Hartford Accident Insurance Company proved less dependable than Twain had hoped. At the end of eighteen months, the company “went to pieces and I was out of pocket twenty-three thousand dollars.” That’s about $495,000 today. But when it came time to collect what the company owed him, Twain was told (again by associates) that Jones was temporarily “straitened and would be glad if I would wait a while” for repayment. This seemed reasonable, Twain decided, because he knew Jones had recently established
a line of artificial ice-house factories clear across the Southern States—nothing like it this side of the great Wall of China. I knew that the factories had cost him a million dollars or so, and that the people down there hadn’t been trained to admire ice and didn’t want any or wouldn’t buy any—that therefore the Chinese Wall was an entire loss and failure.
Twain was also aware that another of the senator’s investments—the St. James Hotel at Broadway and Twenty-sixth Street in Manhattan—was going bust, because of the big-hearted man’s inexhaustible generosity. There were no vacancies for this simple reason: Instead of renting rooms to paying guests, Jones had filled the hotel “from roof to cellar with poor relations gathered from the four corners of the earth—plumbers, bricklayers, unsuccessful clergymen, and in fact, all the different kinds of people that knew nothing about the hotel business.” All these non-paying guests, apparently, camped out at the hotel, “waiting for Jones to find lucrative occupations for them.”
Twain was also painfully aware that the assurance that he would be repaid for his investment in the company had not come from Jones himself but through Jones’s surrogates. It took six months for Jones to learn that Twain had been seeking repayment, and Jones was appalled that Twain had not been paid. Jones wrote a check for $23,000 on the spot. “There are not many John P. Joneses in the world,” Twain said.
MADE WHOLE BY JONES, Twain “was prepared to seek sudden fortune again,” he recalled. “The reader, deceived by what I have been saying about my adventures, will jump to the conclusion that I sought an opportunity at once. I did nothing of the kind. I was the burnt child. I wanted nothing further to do with speculations.”
And it’s true. Twain showed remarkable, uncharacteristic, maybe even superhuman restraint. In the spring of 1877, with the check for $23,000 burning a hole in his pocket, Twain was summoned to the office of the Hartford Courant to witness a demonstration of an invention installed for the newspaper’s use. The inventor had sent an agent to represent the company that was marketing the invention and to sell shares in it. “He believed there was great fortune in store for it and wanted me to take some stock. I declined. I said I didn’t want anything more to do with wildcat speculation.” The agent kept reducing the price; Twain kept refusing to buy. “He became eager—insisted I take five hundred dollars’ worth. He said he would sell me as much as I wanted for five hundred dollars—offered to let me gather it up in my hands and measure it in a plug hat—said I could have a whole hatful for five hundred dollars.” Still he resisted.
That invention was the telephone. The agent was an associate of Alexander Graham Bell’s. He represented the National Bell Telephone Company, which had been formed the previous March, capitalized at $850,000. Its share price in June, shortly after Twain chose not to invest, was $110. By December, the value had shot up to $995. (In fairness to Twain, even Western Union did not see the telephone’s potential, declining an offer to buy the patent from Bell. “The device,” the company said, “is inherently of no value to us.”)
So the telephone salesman struck out with Twain but succeeded with an old Hartford dry-goods clerk who sank his entire life savings of $5,000 into Bell Telephone stock. The next time Twain saw the old man, about a year later, he “was driving around in a sumptuous barouche with liveried servants all over it in piles—and his telephone stock was emptying greenbacks into his premises at such a rate that he had to handle them with a shovel. It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and deserving fail.”
SOME OF THE MAN’S EARNINGS surely came from Twain because he became a Bell Telephone customer himself. Later that year, Twain had a telephone installed in his own home, “the first one that was ever used in a private house in the world.” This is a difficult claim to prove, but so far no one seems to have refuted it. Twain was the kind of man who doesn’t believe a product has much value, but then finds it necessary to buy one for himself.
Twain was always of two minds about this new technology. For business purposes, a telephone could be useful. The line he installed to the telegraph office in Hartford was “like adding a hundred servants to one’s staff for a cent apiece for a week.” It was good for summoning a doctor if a member of the household needed care. But the telephone was also a “profanity-breeding” source of endless annoyance and interruption. Most of what people wanted to use it for was talking nonsense. Its ringing must have also been an unpleasant reminder of the fortune he had forgone by refusing to invest in it. Twain seems to have borne Alexander Graham Bell no ill will personally, but he often wondered if the telephone was not, on balance, a curse.
In a holiday greeting issued a few winters later, Twain wrote: “It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all through-out the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.”
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“A Lie & a Fraud”
Twain’s next business partner of note—after Dan Slote, the scrapbook impresario—was Frank Fuller, another friend from his days out West. Twain and Fuller had met in Virginia City in 1862. Fuller, who worked as a dentist, newspaperman, insurance salesman, speculator in mining stocks, and health food wholesaler, had been Twain’s booking agent for his first lectures in San Francisco.
Fuller had also been a supplier of what Twain liked to call “cundrums,” which was his facetious misspelling for his favorite contraceptive device. In 1868, Fuller was
“making money hand over fist in the manufacture of a patented, odorless India rubber cloth, which is coming greatly into fashion for buggy tops and such things.” It was the other things that interested Twain. He asked Fuller to send him “one dozen Odorless Rubber Cundrums—I don’t mind them being odorless—I can supply the odor myself. I would like to have your picture on them.” That was in August. Twain still hadn’t received the shipment in September but told Fuller not to fret. “I can get along without them, I suppose. My aunt never uses them.”
Fuller’s latest venture was what Twain called “an engine or a furnace or something of the kind which would get out 99 per cent of all the steam that was in a pound of coal.” They called it the Vaporizer, and Twain invested $5,000 in the New York Vaporizer Company. Experts scoffed at the idea that the Vaporizer could do what Fuller and Twain said it could, but the two partners were unfazed. Determined to prove the technology, Twain took the idea to Charles B. Richards, a mechanical engineer at the Colt Armory in Hartford, for his assessment:
He was a specialist and knew all about coal and steam. He seemed to be doubtful about this machine and I asked him why. He said, because the amount of steam concealed in a pound of coal was known to be a fraction and that my inventor was mistaken about his 99 per cent. He showed me a printed book of solid pages of figures, figures that made me drunk and dizzy. He showed me that my man’s machine couldn’t come within 90 per cent of doing what it proposed to do. I went away a little discouraged.
Discouraged, but not defeated. Twain responded to Richards’s opinion by hiring the inventor, one H. C. Bowers, to build a prototype, “on a salary of thirty-five dollars a week, I to pay all expenses.” Under their arrangement, there was no incentive to get the job done promptly, Parkinson’s Law stating, of course, that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. This is especially the case when there is no deadline.
What with frequent visits, when the inventor reported on his progress, it took Bowers “a good many weeks” to build the Vaporizer. Early on Twain noticed by his contractor’s “breath and gait that he was spending thirty-six dollars a week on whisky, and I couldn’t ever find out where he got the other dollar.” Finally, “the machine was finished, but it wouldn’t go. It did save 1 percent of the steam that was in a pound of coal, but that was nothing. You could do it with a tea-kettle.”
Twain had seen enough of the Vaporizer. “So I threw the thing away and looked around for something fresh.” By now, however, Twain had become an “enthusiast on steam” and invested in a Hartford company that “proposed to make and sell and revolutionize everything with a new kind of steam pulley.” Twain never said much more about this venture. Maybe that’s because he didn’t like to think about it. He did say this, though: “The steam pulley pulled thirty-two thousand dollars out of my pocket in sixteen months, then went to pieces and I was alone in the world again, without an occupation.”
ALONE IN THE WORLD without work is an exaggeration, of course, but it is not difficult to see why Twain felt the way he did. He and Livy had two daughters now, and they were running seriously low on funds. The Panic of 1873 took a significant bite out of the coal business and, therefore, out of Livy’s earnings. Strikes in the coal mines further reduced her income. Twain’s investments were also eating into their once-considerable wealth, and after only two years in their new house, they came to realize that they could no longer live in the style to which they had become accustomed in Hartford.
They decided that taking up residence in Europe would be cheaper, or at least less embarrassing, than remaining in Hartford and trying to keep up appearances. So in April 1878, they closed up the mansion and sailed for Germany on the Holsatia. For the next eighteen months, they were renters—in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, and England. Twain worked on another travel book, A Tramp Abroad, while Livy went shopping, amassing more furnishings for their house back in Hartford. In June 1878, when the coal business seemed to show signs of a temporary recovery, Twain told William Dean Howells, “We’ve quit being poor.” Of course, “poor” must be read here in relative terms: Twain and Livy ate in the best restaurants, socialized nonstop, and hired private tutors for their girls.
Occasionally, Livy would receive spending money from her mother back in Elmira. It was fun to shop, Livy told her, “if other people are to pay for the things that I get—then there’s no drawback to the buying.” Still, she fretted about having “such an expensive establishment” and worried about “the prospect of not having money.” She and Twain didn’t always agree about how to spend the money they still had. In April 1879, about six months before their return to America with all their new possessions in tow, Livy wanted to buy items of stained glass for the Hartford house. But Twain, Livy told her mother, “suggested that I reserve it to pay the duties with, now wasn’t that just like a man?”
THEY SAILED HOME from Europe in September 1879. Twain had seen a great deal more of the world than anyone in his family would have ever imagined, and from the vantage point of a well-traveled husband of an heiress, the Tennessee land he and his siblings had inherited seemed remote and insignificant. By this time, Twain had pretty much abandoned all hope of ever seeing any money from his father’s investment in Tennessee real estate—and he no longer seemed to care. Even Orion was beginning to recognize that all his efforts had come to nothing. He had managed to sell some of the land, but in such small parcels and for such negligible prices that the profits scarcely paid the property taxes on whatever land remained.
Orion had a tough time determining just how much of it they still owned because titles were difficult to establish. “I am so sorry to hear you are cramped for means,” he wrote to Pamela and their mother. It gave him “another twinge of conscience,” he said, “that I fooled away the Tennessee land, and some of your money with it.” Orion hadn’t fooled it all away, it turns out, but there wasn’t much left to get excited about.
IN THE SUMMER before their return from Europe, when Twain was thinking about illustrations for A Tramp Abroad, he told Frank Bliss, the son of Elisha Bliss, who took over the company upon his father’s death, that he had come up with an image of his own that he wanted in the book. He had cut out a picture of a popular cartoon character and pasted it onto a “celebrated” Biblical scene. He wanted to attribute this comic mash-up to Titian. But to do justice to this masterpiece, they would need a master engraver to work on it—and he knew just the man. This fellow had been referred by Dan Slote, who, for reasons that are hard to imagine, was allowed to continue marketing Twain’s scrapbook even after Slote’s company had declared bankruptcy—and even after he had taken Twain’s loan and sunk it into a company he knew was insolvent.
The engraver would use a new engraving process—“the best process in the world,” Twain said—whose patent Slote had recently purchased. This new process was so promising, in fact, that in mid-February 1880, Slote sold Twain four-fifths of the patent for $5,000. Twain and Slote were in business together again, this time backing an invention that Twain told Orion “will utterly annihilate & sweep out of existence one of the minor industries of civilization, & take its place—an industry which has existed for 300 years.” Maybe Twain was “mistaken in this calculation,” he said, “but I am not able to see how I can be.”
This innovation they called Kaolotype, a process for book illustration that involved the use of a clay mixture called kaolin and steel plates. Twain formed the Kaolotype Engraving Company, with himself as president and principal stockholder, and Slote as vice president and manager. Within two weeks of purchasing the stock, Twain had thought up new applications for the process that he told Orion would “increase the value of Kaolotype a hundred fold.” It could also be used, Twain decided, for decorating book covers and for engraving type for their titles. But that meant somebody would have to invent something else—something that would enable bookbinders “to mould hard brass with sharp lines & perfect surfaces.”
Twain did his
usual due diligence. Which means he didn’t do much at all, except meet with other visionaries like himself and one or two other thoroughly unscrupulous opportunists, and come away impressed with them all. Everybody who knew anything about the book business “laughed at the idea & said the thing was absolutely impossible.” Everyone, that is, except a young German named Charles Sneider, an associate of Slote’s and inventor of the Kaolotype process. Sneider believed he could do it, so Twain financed the perfection of the process. In November 1880, after months of work, Sneider and Slote showed up at Twain’s house in Hartford with six examples of the brass stamps Sneider had been laboring on for use in the Kaolotype process.
Impressed with what he saw, Twain told Orion that Sneider “has worked the miracle.” Delighted by the inventor’s results, Twain put him on the payroll at $150 a month. He also built a workshop and headquarters building on Fulton Street, below Union Square in Manhattan, where Sneider could continue his work, with Twain paying “attendant expenses.” There was to be an additional $5,000 coming to Sneider when the new applications had been patented. “I never saw people so wild about anything,” Twain told his brother.
Once Slote showed him some “handsome impressions” that Sneider had just produced, Twain decided to spend more than $20,000 for a piece of land adjacent to his own property, in order to build a greenhouse and to enlarge the mansion. A neighbor was planning to put up an outbuilding that would block Twain’s view, so Twain walked to the lot, asked the man what he wanted for the land, and met his demand on the spot. “If the utility of our invention was doubtful,” Twain told Slote, “I would allow my neighbor to go on digging his damned cellar, & build a house right in our faces.”
How Not to Get Rich Page 8