The Unlikely Friendship of Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla

Mark Twain was, in the esti­ma­tion of many, the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca’s first tru­ly home­grown man of let­ters. And in keep­ing with what would be rec­og­nized as the can-do Amer­i­can spir­it, he could­n’t resist putting him­self forth now and again as a man of sci­ence — or, more prac­ti­cal­ly, a man of tech­nol­o­gy. Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured his patent­ed inven­tions (includ­ing a bet­ter bra strap), the type­writer of which he made pio­neer­ing use to write a book, and even the inter­net-pre­dict­ing sto­ry he wrote in 1898. Giv­en Twain’s incli­na­tions, his fame, and the time in which he lived, it may come as no sur­prise to hear that he also struck up a friend­ship with the much-roman­ti­cized inven­tor Niko­la Tes­la.

As it hap­pens, Tes­la had become a fan of Twain’s long before they met, hav­ing found solace in the Amer­i­can writer’s books pro­vid­ed dur­ing a long, near-fatal stretch of child­hood ill­ness. He cred­its his recov­ery with the laugh­ter that read­ing mate­r­i­al pro­vid­ed him, and one imag­ines see­ing life in the U.S. through Twain’s eyes played some part in his even­tu­al emi­gra­tion there.

By that point, Twain him­self was liv­ing in Europe, though his fre­quent vis­its to New York meant that he could drop by Tes­la’s lab and see how his lat­est exper­i­ments with elec­tric­i­ty were going. It was there, in 1894, that the two men took the pho­to­graph above, in which Twain holds a vac­u­um lamp engi­neered by Tes­la and pow­ered (out of frame) by the elec­tro­mag­net­ic coil that bears his name.

As Ian Har­vey writes at The Vin­tage News, “Tes­la was a sci­en­tist whose work large­ly revolved around elec­tric­i­ty; at that time, mak­ing your liv­ing as a sci­en­tist and inven­tor could often mean hav­ing to be some­what of a show­man,” a pres­sure Twain under­stood. His­to­ry has record­ed that Tes­la pro­vid­ed Twain with — in addi­tion to an elec­tric­i­ty-based con­sti­pa­tion cure that worked rather too well — advice against putting his mon­ey into an uncom­pet­i­tive auto­mat­ic type­set­ting machine that, unfor­tu­nate­ly, went unheed­ed. The one­time river­boat cap­tain went on to make an even more unsound invest­ment in a pow­der called Plas­mon, which promised to end world hunger. Per­haps Tes­la’s spir­i­tu­al descen­dants are to be found in today’s Sil­i­con Val­ley, invent­ing the future; Mark Twain’s cer­tain­ly are, under­writ­ing any num­ber of far-fetched schemes, if with far less of a sense of humor.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mark Twain Plays With Elec­tric­i­ty in Niko­la Tesla’s Lab (Pho­to, 1894)

Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Writ­ten With a Type­writer

Mark Twain’s Patent­ed Inven­tions for Bra Straps and Oth­er Every­day Items

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee & More (1926/35)

When David Bowie Became Niko­la Tes­la: Watch His Elec­tric Per­for­mance in The Pres­tige (2006)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.