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"The first thing you want in a
new country is a patent office. A country without a patent
office and good patent laws … couldn't travel any way but
sideways or backwards." -- Mark Twain |
His first invention was for a vest
strap that served as a collar and vest, designed to replace
suspenders. He filed a patent application for it in September of
1871, but he encountered a problem in getting a patent because an
inventor from Baltimore had created a nearly identical product.
In order to determine who should be
awarded the patent, the commissioner of patents must institute an
"interference," which is a contest to determine who created the
invention first.
The commissioner asked each inventor to
file a paper listing the essential dates and facts about his
invention; the patent would then be awarded to the person who could
show that he was the first one to create the invention.
Rather than simply reciting the facts
in numbered paragraphs as was the custom back then, Twain sent a
handwritten letter in short-story form. In his letter, he explained
the details of how he created his invention, including the fact that
his brother witnessed the exact date of his invention. The
commissioner of patents probably enjoyed the human element in
Twain's letter, as it was a welcome departure from the usual mundane
papers submitted to him, but it's not known whether or not this
actually helped Twain.
The dispute was later resolved when the
patent attorneys agreed to settle it based upon the dates on which
the applications were filed, rather than the dates on which each man
originally created his version of the invention, as U.S. patent law
specifies. Twain was granted Patent 122,992 in December of 1871.
Mark Twain received two other patents
during his lifetime. One was in 1873 for a self-pasting scrapbook,
which he named "Mark Twain's Scrapbook," and the other was in 1883
for a game called "Memory Builder." This game made it easier to
remember historical dates, but it didn't succeed commercially.
[to top of
second column in this article]
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Twain earned
a fortune and gained international fame from his writings, yet there
was something significant about his scrapbook invention. What was
it? Read on; the answer is at the end of the story.
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"We are called the nation of
inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and
wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first
thing we invented, which was human liberty."
-- Mark Twain |
While Twain had profited from some of
his inventions, there were other inventions that he thought of but
did not commercialize. In his notebooks, Twain recorded ideas for
microfilm in 1885 and for an invention that would utilize "pictures
transferred by light," similar to modern television, in 1888, as
well as an idea for the use of fingerprinting, which was the
cornerstone of the plot in his novel "Pudd'nhead Wilson," published
in 1894.
Twain lost more than a half million
dollars in his lifetime from the failed inventions in which he
invested, including the Paige typesetter. But the invention that
cost Twain the most was one he did NOT invest in: Alexander Graham
Bell's telephone. When Bell personally offered Twain a chance to
invest in his telephone, Twain responding by telling him that he
wasn't interested because he had been burned once too often on
inventions.
What was the
significance of the scrapbook that Twain invented? He earned more
money from it that year than he did from his writing. Mark Twain was
a moderately successful inventor; without the recognition that he
earned from his writings, the world probably would never have known
of his inventions. He did, however, achieve more success as an
inventor than most inventors do.
[Paul
Niemann]
Paul Niemann is a contributing author to
Inventors' Digest magazine, and he also runs
MarketLaunchers.com, helping people in the marketing of their
new product ideas. He can be reached at
niemann7@aol.com.
Last week's
column in LDN:
"What does this man of peace have to do with dynamite?"
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