Finally: “Some people at this period had a wrong idea, that of making their products cheap so that people could buy them; but [Twain] rectified this false reasoning. An advantage of the bed clamp was that it kept Webster from frittering away time on the Grant book and Huckleberry Finn.”
THERE WERE ALWAYS DISTRACTIONS. There was a perpetual calendar, which was some kind of a watch fob or charm that you could carry on your wrist and, no matter where you went, it never went out of date. No one really knows much about this invention, including museum curators, archivists, and Twain collectors. Twain referred to it only a few times in his correspondence and notebooks, and he never actually described it. In July 1884, for instance, he instructed Webster to “heave your surplus energies . . . [into] my soon-to-be patented portable calendar.” But it appears from U.S. Patent Office records that the perpetual calendar was never patented.
There was also a “spiral pin” that Twain invented, which was supposed to keep ladies’ hats from blowing off their heads in windy weather. He formed the International Spiral Pin Company to develop the invention and “put in ten or twelve thousand dollars,” Twain wrote in 1904. But Twain never seemed to know much about the company and its operations because it “never makes an official report & also refrains from declaring dividends.” Albert Bigelow Paine says Twain “had a number of the pins handsomely made to present to visitors of the sex naturally requiring that sort of adornment and protection. It was a pretty and ingenious device and apparently effective enough, though it failed to secure his invested thousands.” At the time of Twain’s death, he owned 133 shares in the company that were “believed to be worthless.”
Then there was his adventure with the men he called the watch thieves. They were three brothers—one a jeweler, the other two patent medicine salesmen—in Fredonia. In 1881, using Webster’s influence on his famous uncle, the brothers persuaded Twain to invest about $5,000 in the Independent Watch Company, which would later be known as the Fredonia Watch Company. Part of the agreement was that the company would produce and sell a Mark Twain pocket watch, “an early example of a celebrity-endorsed product, but unlike the George Foreman Grill or the Suzanne Somers ThighMaster of the subsequent century, the Mark Twain watch never generated any financial rewards for its namesake.”
Upon discovering that the brothers were bilking what he called “confiding villagers”—himself included—Twain prepared an advertisement to run in newspapers as far away as Buffalo, threatening to expose the crooks. Webster seems to have shown the ad to the watch thieves, which worked. Twain got his money back, as well as that of his sister Pamela, who had invested, too. In the end, the company did manufacture the Mark Twain watch, and collectors still prize them.
THE GRANT BOOK, as Samuel Webster called it, was the second book issued by Twain’s publishing firm. When Ulysses S. Grant and Twain met is a matter of dispute. Their encounter at a December 1879 army reunion in Grant’s honor in Chicago was certainly not their first, since Twain said the former president would recall an earlier meeting. “He would remember me,” Twain said, “because I was the person who did not ask him for an office.” Twain also remembered suggesting back then that Grant write his memoirs.
Grant had put far too much trust in political cronies during his scandal-ridden presidency, and after leaving the White House, he invested heavily in a brokerage firm that collapsed as a result of a business partner’s dishonesty. Credulity, to Twain, was nothing to be ashamed of. He could be guilty of it himself. Besides, Twain genuinely liked and admired Grant, and when he heard that his Civil War memoirs were in the works, he wanted them for Charles L. Webster & Company.
Unfortunately, Grant had promised them in a handshake deal to the Century Company, publisher of Century magazine. The magazine, which had run some of Grant’s battlefield recollections, decided to expand them into a book. The Century Company offered 10 percent royalties with no advance, with what Twain called an “offensive” detail. Part of the 10 percent would be withheld for “sweeping out the offices, or some such nonsense as that.”
In late 1884, a few days after learning of Century’s offer, Twain called on Grant at his Manhattan residence. There he told Grant that the deal the publisher had proposed underestimated the book’s “commercial magnitude.” The terms “indicate that they expect it to sell five, possibly ten thousand copies. A book from your hand, telling the story of your life and battles, should sell not less than a quarter of a million, perhaps twice that sum. It should be sold only by subscription, and you are entitled to double the royalty here proposed. I do not believe it is to your interest to conclude this contract without careful thought and investigation.”
Grant was unconvinced. While he had signed no contract, he still felt honor-bound to give the book to the publisher that first suggested it.
“General, if that is so,” Twain said, “it belongs to me.”
He then reminded Grant that he had urged him to write his memoirs years before—and that he should allow Twain to take charge of its publication.
“General,” he went on, “I am publishing my own book and by the time yours is ready it is quite possible that I shall have the best equipped subscription establishment in the country. If you place your book with my firm—and I feel that I have at least an equal right in the consideration—I will pay you twenty per cent of the list price, or, if you prefer, I will give you seventy per cent of the net returns and I will pay all office expenses out of my thirty per cent.” Twain would pay for “sweeping out the offices” himself.
Grant, who would soon be diagnosed with throat cancer, signed a contract with Webster & Company in February 1885. Over the next few months, Grant worked on the manuscript, soldiering on even as he became increasingly frail and in pain and, toward the end, unable to speak. In the summer, when the manuscript was complete, he died, and Twain’s often harried staff at Webster & Company pushed the book toward publication. Volume one of The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant was released in December. Sales exceeded everyone’s expectations—except Twain’s. In February of 1886, Julia Dent Grant, the author’s widow, was presented with a check for $200,000, roughly the equivalent today of $4 million, and, at its time, the largest single royalty payment ever made. The second volume was published in March of that year. More than 300,000 sets of the two volumes were sold, and Charles L. Webster & Company paid Grant’s widow more than $400,000, or about $8 million in today’s currency. Twain earned about $200,000 from the venture.
Webster & Company had another brisk seller on its hands, too. Huckleberry Finn was released in the United States in February 1885, the same month that Grant signed his contract with the firm. When Huckleberry Finn sold out its initial run of 30,000 copies, Webster & Company rushed out another 10,000 in March. When the public library in Concord, Massachusetts, announced later in the month that it wouldn’t lend the ill-bred Huck’s story to its genteel patrons, Twain immediately recognized the value of what we call “buzz.” The library has “given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country,” he told Webster, immediately generating 25,000 more sales. As we know today, there’s never been a time when the novel wasn’t controversial, and there has never been a time when it was out of print. At last count, Huckleberry Finn had sold at least 20 million copies in no fewer than fifty languages.
With the booming profits from Huckleberry Finn and Grant’s memoir, Twain told Howells he was “totally free from debt.” Twain, who would soon turn fifty, had achieved an astonishing level of fame; he claimed to be “frightened by the proportions of my prosperity. It seems that whatever I touch turns to gold.” Aflame with confidence, Twain was now eager to exercise his Midas touch and grow that fortune.
15
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“This Awful Mechanical Miracle”
The next enterprise to which the Midas touch was to be applied was one Twain actually knew something about. He first learned of this new investment opportunity a few years ear
lier, when the owner of a jewelry store on Hartford’s Main Street came to call. The two men met in Twain’s billiard room, “which was my study,” though billiards always “got more study than the other sciences.” The jeweler told Twain that an inventor he knew, one James W. Paige, was working on a machine that would revolutionize the newspaper business. Paige, who rented a workshop at the Colt Armory, was about finished with the prototype. He was looking for investors. Twain could get in on the ground floor.
It was a machine for setting type. Twain, though skeptical, was nonetheless intrigued. Type was set the same way in the 1880s as it had been when Twain worked as a printer’s devil thirty years earlier—by hand. In fact, typesetting hadn’t changed much since Ben Franklin’s day, or even Gutenberg’s. Newspaper proprietors were eager to find a way to perform the costly, labor-intensive function by machine, and in the 1870s a number of tinkerers were at work to meet the demand. Twain recognized the need to find a cheaper, more efficient, and less error-prone method for setting type, but he also had real-world, hands-on understanding of how difficult it would be to accomplish this goal.
This skepticism was also rooted in his suspicion that the wonders Paige’s machine was supposed to perform would not be possible until other technological innovations had first been achieved—technological innovations he could not himself imagine and spoke of with some amusement. “I knew all about typesetting by practical experience,” Twain said, “and held [with] the settled and solidified opinion that a successful typesetting machine was an impossibility, for the reason that a machine cannot be made to think, and the thing that sets movable type must think of retiring defeated.” But Twain was willing to take a flier on the possibility that this prejudice of his might be unwarranted. He was “always taking little chances like that; and almost always losing by it, too—a thing which I did not greatly mind, because I was always careful to risk only such amounts as I could easily afford to lose.”
WHEN TWAIN MET PAIGE and saw Paige’s work in progress, he was greatly impressed. He went to the Colt Armory, “promising myself nothing,” but came away eager to invest. Paige himself was impressive. He was “bright-eyed, alert, smartly dressed,” and a great salesman and presenter. He “could persuade a fish to come out and take a walk with him.”
The Paige Compositor, as it was called, might not have been able to think, but it seemed to behave almost as if it could. It was unquestionably a marvel of complexity. The patent application included 275 sheets of drawings and 123 more of specifications. The 5,000-pound contraption had more than 18,000 parts, with a 109-key keyboard worked by only one man. Pieces of type were dropped from upright silos, each of which held 200 characters. Dropped from its silo, the type slid into what has been described as a “raceway,” in which the lines of type were assembled. Once the type was used, it was dumped underneath, where it would be shuttled back up to the top and deposited into the appropriate silo. The only thing the Paige Compositor couldn’t do (besides write newspaper stories itself) was make sure the lines ran flush right, or were, as they say, “justified.” An assistant had to insert steel spaces of various sizes to make the lines come out even at the end.
When the machine worked, it set type six times faster than a skilled human typesetter could. Using a Paige machine, Twain said, a New York daily could set up an entire page for what it “now costs to set a column by hand.” It had additional advantages, too. The Paige Compositor “does not get drunk,” and it “does not join the Printer’s Union.”
There were, by Twain’s reckoning, 11,000 newspapers and periodicals being published. If only 1,000 of their publishers installed a Paige Compositor, he figured revenues would reach $2.5 million. Twain was not insensitive to the fact that this technological innovation would make many jobs obsolete. Economist Joseph Schumpeter, author of Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, called it “creative destruction.” Innovation always costs a lot of people their jobs, but Twain contented himself—as champions of innovation always do—by claiming it would actually create jobs, given time. As newspaper production costs declined, more and bigger newspapers would be printed. Higher profits would allow publishers to reinvest their profits into their businesses, producing more printed materials. For every typesetter who lost his job, Twain said, “10 will get work.”
This very question—the effect of technological innovation on the newspaper business—was not entirely new. The French economist Frederic Bastiat addressed it, and his view seems to align well with Twain’s, though there is no evidence Twain ever read Bastiat or, for that matter, any other economist. Even in Bastiat’s day (he died in 1850) the price of producing newspapers had fallen, saving money not only for publishers but also for subscribers. But this savings didn’t mean newspaper subscribers would simply subscribe to more newspapers, or that more newspapers would be published, as Twain argued. Even if consumers did not subscribe to more newspapers and more newspapers were not published, Bastiat said the savings would be invested somewhere else. Maybe some consumers might use the money saved to subscribe to more newspapers, but that didn’t really matter, because others would use it to buy new clothes and yet others would buy better furniture.
“It is thus,” Bastiat wrote, “that the trades are bound together. They form a vast whole, whose different parts communicate by secret channels; what is saved by one, profits all.”
That was Twain’s view, and the view of countless entrepreneurs today. Innovation benefits all mankind, and especially the man who can monetize it.
TWAIN INVESTED $2,000 in Paige’s machine almost immediately. After seeing the machine and meeting its inventor, he invested $3,000 more. Twain invested yet again and waited while the inventor kept working out the bugs. Before long, Twain was bankrolling the inventor and his machine to the tune of $3,000 per month. He had not laid eyes on Paige for at least a year when, one day in late 1885, the inventor showed up unannounced at the Hartford house. He told Twain the machine was almost perfect—that it would soon be able to justify the lines—but he needed more money.
“What will it cost?” Twain asked.
“$20,000,” Paige said. “Certainly not over $30,000.”
Twain, who was “flush” at the time, said, “I’ll do it, but the limit must be $30,000.”
Under the new contract, Twain assumed full responsibility for finding additional financing and for marketing the compositor. Frank Whitmore, a neighbor and insurance man who was put on Twain’s payroll to oversee Paige, warned Twain not to sign the new agreement, which could make Twain almost solely responsible for the entire venture, especially because it could become ruinously expensive. That contract, Whitmore said, “can bankrupt you.”
“I’ve considered that,” Twain said. “I can get a thousand men worth a million apiece to go in with me if I can get a perfect machine.”
Even Albert Bigelow Paine, in his wholly sympathetic biography, described the euphoria that gripped Twain during this period as almost beyond imagining. Notebook pages were filled with the angel investor’s calculations—and with lists of prospective investors and how much capital they would be likely to invest. Twain figured 2,173 typesetters would be needed in the United States alone, with 6,500 worldwide. Twain “began to calculate the number of millions he would be worth” when the machine “was completed and announced to a waiting world.” His figures “never ran short of millions, and frequently approached the billion mark.” He said it “would take ten men to count the profits from the typesetter.”
But within a year, the $30,000 had been spent, and Paige had still not “perfected” the machine. He now needed $4,000 more to finish his work, and for an extra $10,000, he could demonstrate it at an exhibition in New York. In effect, he had started over. He was working on a completely new machine, this time at the Pratt & Whitney factory in Hartford. The Paige 2.0 would require 20,000 parts—compared to “only” 18,000 before. Undaunted, Twain gave the inventor $4,000 more, and then kept advancing him more money until he was spending up to $4,000 a month
. In early 1888, he had invested some $80,000—or $1,950,000 in our time—in the venture, and seemed not a great deal closer to putting the compositor on the market.
At first, the time it was taking to get the machine ready did not concern Twain unduly; but later, of course, as the money he was sinking into the compositor drained his accounts, he began to worry about the delays—and about Paige himself. As enraptured as he was with inventors and inventions, he also understood that great inventions are not, in fact, the work of one isolated genius, barricaded for years in his dimly lit basement. They are in large part the result of communities of diligent amateurs who follow each other’s progress—sometimes by reading trade journals, sometimes by knowing one another and discussing the challenges they face.
Technological breakthroughs are also the result of the accumulated knowledge of entire societies. Understanding all this provided Twain some comfort as he watched and waited—and continued to invest in the Paige Compositor. “It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others,” he said. The actual inventor “added his little mite—that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”
AS PAIGE TINKERED with his compositor, inventors were already marketing less complicated machines, with Ottmar Mergenthaler’s Linotype machine enjoying the first-mover advantage. New York Sun publisher William Laffan, who had seen a demonstration of the Mergenthaler, told Twain he should be wary of this competition, which every New York daily will be using “inside of twelve months.” Twain shrugged off this warning. He was “unaffrighted” of the Mergenthaler—and of all the other Mergenthalers of the world. By 1887, Laffan was still impressed with the Mergenthaler Linotype and told Twain the New York newspaper publishers were “all ready to talk machines.” Still unaffrighted, Twain said it would take 157 Mergenthalers to set the type for the 419 pages that all the New York papers published each week, but only 63 Paige Compositors.
How Not to Get Rich Page 10