What did Mark Twain invent? Fun facts about Mark Twain: his inventions, unusual lectures and pseudonyms. Attitude to religion

Nickname "Mark Twain"

However, there is a version about the literary origin of this pseudonym: in 1861, a humorous story by Artemus Ward was published in Vanity Fair magazine ( Artemus Ward) (real name Charles Brown) “North Star” is about three sailors, one of whom was named Mark Twain. Samuel was very fond of the humorous section of this magazine and read the works of Ward in his first appearances.

In addition to “Mark Twain,” Clemens once signed in 1896 as “Sire Louis de Conte” (French: Sieur Louis de Conte) - under this name he published his novel “Personal Memoirs of Joan of Arc of Sir Louis de Conte, her page and secretary."

Biography

Childhood and youth

Mark Twain at 15

In total, John and Jane had seven children, of whom only four survived: Samuel himself, his brothers Orion (July 17, 1825 - December 11, 1897) and Henry (1838-1858), and sister Pamela (1827-1904). His older sister Margaret (1833-1839) died when Samuel was 3 years old, and his other older brother Benjamin (1832-1842) died 3 years later. His other older brother, Pleasant (1828-1829), died before Samuel was born at the age of six months. When Samuel was 4 years old, the family moved to the city of Hannibal (also in Missouri) in search of a better life. It was this city and its inhabitants that were later described by Mark Twain in his famous works, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).

Before starting a literary career

Mark Twain c. 1851

But the call of the Mississippi River still led Clemens to work as a pilot on a steamship. It was a profession that Clemens himself admitted that he would have practiced all his life if the Civil War had not put an end to private shipping in 1861. So Clemens was forced to look for another job.

After a brief acquaintance with the people's militia (an experience he colorfully described in 1885), Clemens left the war west in July 1861. Then his brother Orion was offered the position of secretary to the governor of the Nevada Territory. Sam and Orion traveled for two weeks across the prairies in a stagecoach to a Virginia mining town where silver was being mined in Nevada.

In the West

The experience of living in the Western United States shaped Twain as a writer and formed the basis of his second book. In Nevada, hoping to get rich, Sam Clemens became a miner and began mining for silver. He had to live for a long time in a camp with other miners - a lifestyle he later described in literature. But Clemens could not become a successful prospector; he had to leave silver mining and get a job at the Territorial Enterprise newspaper there, in Virginia. In this newspaper he first used the pseudonym "Mark Twain". In 1864, he moved to San Francisco, where he began writing for several newspapers at the same time. In 1865, Twain had his first literary success; his humorous story “The Famous Jumping Frog of Calaveras” was reprinted throughout the country and called “the best work of humorous literature created in America up to this point.”

In the spring of 1866, Twain was sent to Hawaii by the Sacramento Union newspaper. As the journey progressed, he had to write letters about his adventures. Upon returning to San Francisco, these letters were a resounding success. Colonel John McComb, publisher of the Alta California newspaper, invited Twain to tour the state giving fascinating lectures. The lectures immediately became wildly popular, and Twain traveled throughout the state, entertaining the public and collecting a dollar from each listener.

First book

Twain achieved his first success as a writer on another journey. In 1867, he persuaded Colonel McComb to sponsor him for a trip to Europe and the Middle East. In June, as a correspondent "Alta California" and the New York Tribune, Twain traveled to Europe on the Quaker City. In August, he also visited Odessa, Yalta and Sevastopol (the “Odessa Bulletin” of August 24, 1867 contains the “Address” of American tourists, written by Twain). As part of the ship's delegation, Mark Twain visited the residence of the Russian Emperor in Livadia.

Letters written by Twain during his travels through Europe and Asia were sent to his editor and published in the newspaper, and later formed the basis of the book "Simps Abroad". The book was published in 1869, distributed by subscription and was a huge success. Until the very end of his life, many knew Twain precisely as the author of “Simps Abroad.” During his writing career, Twain had the opportunity to travel throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

In 1870, at the height of his success from Innocents Abroad, Twain married Olivia Langdon and moved to Buffalo, New York. From there he moved to the city of Hartford (Connecticut). During this period he lectured frequently in the United States and England. He then began writing biting satire, sharply criticizing American society and politicians, most notably in Life on the Mississippi, written in 1883.

Creative career

One of the things that inspired Mark Twain was the note-taking style of John Ross Brown.

Twain's greatest contribution to American and world literature is considered to be the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Also very popular are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and the collection of autobiographical stories Life on the Mississippi. Mark Twain began his career with unpretentious humorous couplets, and ended with sketches of human morals full of subtle irony, sharply satirical pamphlets on socio-political topics and philosophically deep and, at the same time, very pessimistic reflections on the fate of civilization.

Many public speeches and lectures were lost or not recorded, and certain works and letters were banned from publication by the author himself during his lifetime and for decades after his death.

Twain was an excellent speaker. Having gained recognition and fame, Mark Twain devoted a lot of time to searching for young literary talents and helping them break through, using his influence and the publishing company he acquired.

Twain was passionate about science and was friends with Nikola Tesla. They spent a lot of time together in Tesla's laboratory. In his work “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,” Twain introduced time travel, as a result of which many modern technologies were introduced in England during the time of King Arthur. The technical details given in the novel indicate that Twain was well acquainted with the achievements of contemporary science.

In 1882—more than a decade before fingerprinting techniques became known in the United States—Twain described the fingerprint search for a criminal in Life on the Mississippi.

Mark Twain's other two most famous hobbies were playing billiards and smoking. Visitors to Twain's house sometimes said that there was such thick tobacco smoke in the writer's office that the owner himself could hardly be seen.

Last years

Mark Twain and Henry Rogers. 1908

Before his death, the writer experienced the loss of three of his four children, and his wife Olivia also died. In his later years, Twain was deeply depressed, but he could still joke. In response to an erroneous obituary in the New York Journal, he famously said: “Rumors of my death are somewhat exaggerated”. Twain's financial situation also deteriorated: his publishing company went bankrupt; he invested a lot of money in a new model of printing press, which was never put into production; Plagiarists stole the rights to several of his books.

Mark Twain's grave

In 1893, Twain was introduced to oil magnate Henry Rogers, one of the directors of Standard Oil. Rogers helped Twain reorganize his financial affairs profitably, and they became close friends. Twain often visited Rogers and they drank and played poker. You could say that Twain even became a member of the family for the Rogers. Rogers' sudden death in 1909 deeply affected Twain. Although Mark Twain publicly thanked Rogers many times for saving him from financial ruin, it became clear that their friendship was mutually beneficial. Apparently, Twain had a significant influence on softening the tough temper of the oil tycoon, who had the nickname “Cerberus Rogers.” After Rogers' death, his papers showed that his friendship with the famous writer turned a ruthless miser into a true philanthropist and philanthropist. During his friendship with Twain, Rogers began to actively support education, organizing educational programs, especially for blacks and talented people with disabilities.

Samuel Clemens, known throughout the world as Mark Twain, died on April 21, 1910, at the 75th year of life, from angina pectoris (angina pectoris). A year before his death, he said: “I came in 1835 with Halley's Comet, a year later it arrives again, and I expect to leave with it.” And so it happened.

The writer was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery V Elmira(New York State).

Memory

• In the city of Hannibal, Missouri, preserved the house where Twain played as a boy; and the caves that he explored as a child and which were later described in the famous Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Tourists come there now. Mark Twain's house in Hartford has been turned into his personal museum and declared a national historical treasure in the United States.
• In the Russian cities of Volgograd and Derbent there are streets named after Mark Twain [ ] .
• Named after Twain in 1976 crater on Mercury.
• On November 8, 1984, in honor of Mark Twain, the asteroid discovered on September 24, 1976 by N. S. Chernykh at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory was given the name (2362) Mark Twain .
• Google Doodle in honor of the writer’s 176th birthday.

• Mark Twain National Forest.
• Mark Twain- state park.
• Mark Twain- reservoir.
• Mark Twain's Cave - tourist cave near Hannibal.

Views

Political Views

Mark Twain's views on the ideal form of government and political regime can be found by reading his speech “The Knights of Labor - a New Dynasty,” which he delivered on March 22, 1886 in Hartford, at a meeting of the Monday Night Club. This speech, entitled “The New Dynasty,” was first published in September 1957 in New England Quarterly.

Mark Twain took the position that power should belong to the people and the people alone:

The power of one man over another means oppression—invariably and always oppression; let it not always be conscious, deliberate, deliberate, not always harsh, or heavy, or cruel, or indiscriminate, but one way or another - always oppression in one form or another. Whoever you give power to, it will certainly manifest itself in oppression. Give power to the Dahomey king - and he will immediately begin to test the accuracy of his brand new rapid-fire rifle on everyone who passes by his palace; people will fall one after another, but neither he nor his courtiers will even think that he is doing something inappropriate. Give power to the head of the Christian church in Russia - the emperor - and with one wave of his hand, as if driving away midges, he will send countless young men, mothers with babies in their arms, gray-haired elders and young girls into the unimaginable hell of his Siberia, while he himself calmly goes to breakfast, without even realizing what barbarity he had just committed. Give power to Constantine or Edward IV, or Peter the Great, or Richard III - I could name a hundred more monarchs - and they will kill their closest relatives, after which they will fall asleep perfectly, even without sleeping pills... Give power to anyone - and this power will be oppress.

The author divided people into two categories: oppressors And oppressed. The first are few - the king, a handful of other overseers and assistants, and the second are many - these are the peoples of the world: the best representatives of humanity, working people - those who earn bread with their labor. Twain believed that all the rulers who had so far ruled the world sympathized with and patronized the classes and clans of gilded loafers, clever embezzlers, tireless intriguers, troublemakers, thinking only about their own benefit. According to the writer, the only ruler or king should be the people themselves:

But this king is a born enemy of those who intrigue and speak beautiful words, but do not work. He will be our reliable defense against socialists, communists, anarchists, against vagabonds and selfish agitators who advocate “reforms” that would give them a piece of bread and fame at the expense of honest people. He will be our refuge and protection against them and against all types of political illness, infection and death.

How does he use his power? First - for oppression. For he is no more virtuous than those who ruled before him, and does not want to lead anyone astray. The only difference is that he will oppress the minority, while they oppressed the majority; he will oppress thousands, and they oppressed millions. But he will not throw anyone into prison, will not whip, torture, burn or exile anyone, will not force his subjects to work eighteen hours a day and will not starve their families. He will make sure everything is fair - a fair day's work, a fair wage.

Attitude to religion

Twain's wife, a deeply religious Protestant (Congregationalist), was never able to “convert” her husband, although he tried to avoid sensitive topics during her lifetime. Many of Twain's novels (for example, A Yankee in King Arthur's Court) contain extremely harsh attacks on the Catholic Church. In recent years, Twain wrote many religious stories in which he satirized the Protestant ethic (for example, “Curious Bessie”).

Now let's talk about the true God, the real God, the great God, the highest and supreme God, the true creator of the real universe... - a universe not handcrafted for an astronomical nursery, but sprung into existence in the limitless extent of space at the command of the true God just mentioned, a God unimaginably great and majestic, in comparison with which all the other gods, swarming in myriads in the pitiful human imagination, are like a swarm of mosquitoes lost in the infinity of the empty sky...

When we explore the countless wonders, splendor, brilliance and perfection of this infinite universe (we now know that the universe is infinite) and see that everything in it, from a blade of grass to the forest giants of California, from an unknown mountain stream to a boundless ocean, from the course of the tides and low tides to the majestic movement of the planets, unquestioningly obeys a strict system of precise laws that know no exceptions, we comprehend - we do not assume, we do not conclude, but we comprehend - that God, who with one thought created this incredibly complex world, and with another thought created the laws that govern it , - this God is endowed with limitless power...

Do we know that he is just, gracious, kind, meek, merciful, compassionate? No. We have no evidence that he possesses at least one of these qualities - and at the same time, every day that comes brings us hundreds of thousands of evidence - no, not evidence, but irrefutable evidence - that he does not possess any of them .

Due to his complete absence of any of those qualities that could adorn a god, inspire respect for him, arouse reverence and worship, the real god, the true god, the creator of the vast universe is no different from all the other gods available. Every day he makes it absolutely clear that he is not at all interested in man or other animals - except in order to torture them, destroy them and extract some kind of entertainment from this activity, while doing everything possible to prevent his eternal and unchanging monotony he didn't get tired of it.

Attitude to the Church

A person is accepted into the fold of the church for what he believes, but is expelled from there for what he knows.

• Mark Twain. Collected works in eleven volumes. - St. Petersburg. : Type. Panteleev brothers, 1896-1899.
  • Volume 1. "American Challenger", humorous essays and stories;
  • Volume 2. "A Yankee in King Arthur's Court";
  • Volume 3. “The Adventures of Tom Sower”, “Tom Sower Abroad”;
  • Volume 4. “Life on the Mississippi”;
  • Volume 5. “The Adventures of Finn Huckleberry, Tom Sower's Companion”;
  • Volume 6. “Walk Abroad”;
  • Volume 7. “The Prince and the Pauper,” “The Detective Exploits of Tom Sower in Huck Finn’s Show”;
  • Volume 8. Stories;
  • Volume 9. Simple-minded at home and abroad;
  • Volume 10. The simple-minded at home and abroad (conclusion);
  • Volume 11. “Chaff Head Wilson,” from “New Wanderings Around the World.”
• Mark Twain. Collected works in 12 volumes. - M.: GIHL, 1959-1961, 300,000 copies.
  • Volume 1. Simpletons abroad, or the path of new pilgrims
  • Volume 2. Light
  • Volume 3. The Gilded Age
  • Volume 4. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Life on the Mississippi
  • Volume 5. Walking around Europe. Prince and the Pauper
  • Volume 6. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
  • Volume 7. American Challenger. Tom Sawyer abroad. Dude Wilson
  • Volume 8. Personal memories of Joan of Arc
  • Volume 9. Along the equator. A mysterious stranger
  • Volume 10. Stories. Essays. Journalism. 1863-1893
  • Volume 11. Stories. Essays. Journalism. 1894-1909
  • Volume 12. From “Autobiography”. From "Notebooks"
• Mark Twain. Collected Works in 8 volumes. - M.: “Pravda” (series “Library “Ogonyok””), 1980
• Mark Twain. Collected Works in 8 volumes. - M.: Voice, Verb, 1994. - ISBN 5-900288-05-6, 5-900288-09-9
• Mark Twain. Collected works in 18 volumes. - M.: Terra, 2002. - ISBN 5-275-00668-3, 5-275-00670-5

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known to us as Mark Twain, was born exactly 180 years ago, on November 30, 1835, two weeks after the perihelion of Halley's Comet. In 1909, he wrote: “I came into this world with a comet and I will leave with it too when it arrives next year.” And so it happened: Twain died on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet’s next perihelion. And his whole life, like a comet, illuminated the literary (and not only) firmament, leaving behind a bright mark. William Faulkner wrote that Mark Twain was “the first truly American writer, and we have all been his heirs ever since,” and Ernest Hemingway believed that all modern American literature came from one book by Mark Twain, called “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” " His work covers many genres - humor, satire, philosophical fiction, journalism and others, and in all these genres he invariably takes the position of a humanist and democrat. His talent was fabulously generous. And he said exactly about himself: “With all the lightness and frivolity, my writings have one serious goal: to ridicule pretense, hypocrisy and stupid prejudices from life.” People often ask which contemporary writers can be compared with him. No one. He has no equal.

Sam was born prematurely in the small town of Florida (Missouri, USA), everyone expected his imminent death. But it passed. He later joked that being born increased its population by one percent. In the family of a provincial lawyer and shopkeeper, John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens, he was the sixth child in a family of seven children, of whom only four survived. His mother, red-haired Jane Lempton, was, according to the testimony of all who knew her in her youth, one of the first beauties of the state of Kentucky. Witty, quick, bright, she retained her extraordinary cheerfulness until old age. “She had a fragile little body, but a big heart - so big that both other people’s grief and other people’s joys found response and shelter in it,” says Twain in his memoirs. Jane Clemens was also a talented storyteller. In all likelihood, it was she who Twain had in mind when he wrote in the essays “Helfare Hotchkiss” (these essays have not yet been published in full, only a few dozen lines of which are known): “I know now that she had an extraordinary gift of speech; None of the people I have ever met could compare with her. At that time (that is, in childhood) I did not understand this, and I believe that no one in our entire village had the slightest idea that she was a miracle. miracles; no one even suspected that she stood out in any way from the circle of ordinary people. It took twenty years, during which I had the opportunity to meet many wonderful storytellers, before I began to understand that none of them can be compared in any way. regarding the ability to speak eloquently and movingly with this artless and unlearned storyteller from a western village, with this inconspicuous little woman who had a beautiful soul, a big heart and a magical tongue."

John Marshall Clemens was a different type of man - stern and somewhat pedantic. His marriage to the unrestrainedly cheerful and even frivolous Jane Lempton could not be called happy. Among Twain’s autobiographical notes are the following lines: “As a child, I saw that my father and mother ... were always attentive to each other, but there was nothing warmer in their relationship; there were no external and noticeable manifestations of love. This did not surprise me , because in my father’s whole appearance and in his speech there was a sense of dignity, his manners were stern... My mother, by nature, was a warm-hearted person. It seemed natural to me that her spiritual warmth did not find an outlet in the atmosphere that was created around my father.” A typical southerner, Twain's father considered slaveholding principles to be something undeniable. However, he was close to some elements of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, perceived through the articles, speeches and pamphlets of leading figures during the American War of Independence. John Clemens was a sincere republican, deified reason and despised religious dogma. Samuel Clemens owes something to his father for his characteristic faith in reason and negative attitude towards the church.

Sam was bedridden until he was 4 years old, and was stunted until he was 7 years old. In her old age, with her characteristic willingness to joke, Jane Clemens, when asked by her son whether she was worried that he would die as a baby, answered slyly: “No, I was afraid that you would survive.” Sam grew up as a nervous child. But fortunately, Uncle Quarles had a farm near Florida. There was wonderful air there; in addition, the children were excellently fed (“fried chickens, pigs, wild and domestic turkeys, ducks and geese, fresh venison, squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, quails; crackers, hot porridge, hot buckwheat, hot buns, hot corn cakes; boiled ears of young corn, beans, beans, tomatoes, peas..." - this is how Twain recalled the long list of dishes that were served on Uncle Quarles' farm). The sickly boy began to turn into a strong man.

When Mark Twain was 4 years old, his family, in search of a better life, moved to the town of Hannibal (also in Missouri) - a river port on the Mississippi River, but he never learned to swim, although he was drawn to the river, where he fell many times through negligence, and even drowned in the Mississippi 9 times. Subsequently, it was this city that would serve as the prototype for the town of St. Petersburg in the famous novels “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” At this time, Missouri was a slave state, so already at this time Mark Twain encountered slavery, which he would later describe and condemn in his works.

In March 1847, when Mark Twain was 11 years old, his father died of pneumonia, leaving him with many debts. The eldest son, Orion, soon began publishing the Hannibal Journal, and Sam began to contribute to it as a typesetter and occasionally as a writer. Some of the newspaper's liveliest and most controversial articles came from the pen of the younger brother - usually when Orion was away. The Orion newspaper soon closed, and the brothers diverged their paths for many years, only to cross again by the end of the Civil War in Nevada. At the age of 18 he left Hannibal and worked in a printing shop in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati and other cities. He studies in the evenings. In New York he studies in the evenings, spending a lot of time in the library, where he reads a lot and takes notes: Thackeray, Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Shakespeare, Cervantes... thus he received as much knowledge as he would have received after graduating from a regular school.

But the call of the Mississippi River drew Clemens. At the age of 22, Twain took a boat to New Orleans. Then he had a dream to drive steamboats. Having started as a helmsman on the steamship Pennsylvania, and having perfectly studied all the intricacies of a difficult craft and more than three thousand kilometers of the channel of a changeable river, Sam Clemens received a pilot's license two years later. Samuel recruited his younger brother to work with him. But Henry died on June 21, 1858 due to a boiler explosion on the steamship he was working on. Mark Twain later said that he foresaw the death of his brother Henry - he dreamed of the tragedy a month before. This incident, combined with the feeling of guilt for the death of his brother, which did not leave him until his death, laid Mark Twain's interest in parapsychology. After this incident, he became interested in parapsychology. He subsequently became a member of the Society for Psychical Research, which studied the phenomena of mesmerism, telepathy and other paranormal phenomena. But that will come later, but for now he continued to work on the river and worked until the Civil War broke out, putting an end to private shipping on the Mississippi. The war forced him to change his profession, which, according to Clemens himself, he would have been doing all his life, and he regretted it for the rest of his life. Shortly before the war (May 22, 1861), Twain entered Freemasonry at North Star Lodge No. 79 in St. Louis.

After a short acquaintance with the Confederate militia (he colorfully described this experience in 1885), where he was even awarded the rank of lieutenant, Clemens, after the collapse of the detachment, deserted from the ranks of the army of the inhabitants of the South in July 1861 and headed west, to his brother Orion , who was offered the position of secretary to the governor of the newly created Nevada Territory, James Nye. A stagecoach trip across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, a visit to the Mormon community in Salt Lake City and other impressions from the trip later served as material for the autobiographical book “The Tempered” (1872), in Russian translation - “Light.” Theodore Dreiser regarded this book as "a vivid picture of a fantastic and yet very real era of American history." Indeed, at that time a new era for America began. Mark Twain wrote that when he was in the town of Hannibal, wealth was not the main meaning of life for Americans, and only the discovery of gold in California “gave rise to the passion for money that has come to dominate today.” His later story “The Man Who Corrupted Hedleyburg” (1899) is also devoted to the same topic - about how money corrupts entire cities.

Then a rumor had just spread that silver had been found on the wild prairies of this state. Here, hoping to get rich, Samuel worked for a whole year in a silver mine, living for a long time in a camp with other prospectors, where he passed “his own universities” among harsh miners, arrogant nouveau riche, corrupt women, inveterate scoundrels and cunning rogues, while simultaneously honing the skills of the young writer. Signing as Josh or Tramp, he wrote humorous stories and pieces about the lives of prospectors for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in the Virginia City mining community, perched forlornly on the slope of Mount Davison, “the fastest growing town” in the West, which even had its own opera house built by German immigrant John Piper. In August 1862, Clemens received an invitation from the newspaper to become its permanent contributor. Sam could not become a successful prospector, but leaving silver mining and getting a job at a newspaper, he made the right decision. However, to be effective, it was necessary to change the pseudonym: there was some kind of gambling farce in the faceless name Josh, but his articles and sketches, which the miners and beauties of Virginia City reveled in, should be associated with a name that, while not mysterious, was not very clear. It was then that he first used the pseudonym “Mark Twain,” which was used to caption the story “Letter from Carson,” published on February 3, 1863. Clemens claimed that the pseudonym "Mark Twain" was taken by him in his youth from river navigation terms when he was an assistant pilot on the Mississippi, and the cry "mark twain" meant that, according to At the mark on the lotline, the minimum depth suitable for the passage of river vessels has been reached - 2 fathoms (≈ 3.7 m). However, there is a version about the literary origin of this pseudonym: in 1861, Vanity Fair magazine published a humorous story by Artemus Ward “North Star” about three sailors, one of whom was named Mark Twain. Samuel was very fond of the humorous section of this magazine and read Ward's works in his first stand-up performances. In addition to “Mark Twain,” Clemens once signed in 1896 as “Sieur Louis de Conte” (French: Sieur Louis de Conte) - under this name he published his novel “Personal Memoirs of Joan of Arc of Sieur Louis de Conte, her page and secretary." Twain had other pseudonyms: Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, Sergeant Fathom and W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab. This is how the writer Mark Twain appeared in the spaces of America, who in the future managed to win world recognition with his work.

Mark Twain's glorious path from Virginia City to world literature ran through San Francisco (which grew rich during the Gold Rush and received a hefty sum during the Silver Rush), where he moved in 1864. He wrote: “For several months I was in an unusual state for myself - I was free as a moth: I did nothing, did not report to anyone and did not experience any financial worries. The most welcoming and sociable city in our country has captured my heart. After the salt marshes and sagebrush of the Nevada expanse, San Francisco seemed like paradise to me. I lived in the best hotel in the city, flaunted my clothes, and attended the opera extensively.” He became a gold miner, but did not leave his reporting job, immediately blazing a trail into Californian newspaper publications, starting to write for several newspapers at the same time. In 1865, Twain received his first literary success - on November 18, the New York literary weekly The Saturday Press published his humorous story “The Famous Jumping Frog from Calaveras,” which was liked by both readers and critics, and was subsequently reprinted by many publications throughout the country and called "the best work of humorous literature produced in America up to this point." In the spring of 1866, Twain was sent by the Sacramento Union newspaper to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). While traveling through the Sandwich Islands, he rode a lot in the saddle and eventually developed painful boils on his skin. While he was lying in a hotel in Honolulu, the surviving passengers from the wrecked Hornet ship were brought there. Mark Twain managed to organize a press conference with them - and sensational information under his name hit the front pages of all newspapers in the world. Along the way, he had to write letters to the newspaper editor about his adventures. Upon returning to San Francisco, these letters were a resounding success. Colonel John McComb, publisher of the Alta California newspaper, invited Twain to tour the state giving fascinating lectures. The lectures immediately became wildly popular, and Twain not only traveled all over the state, but also made a lot of money, entertaining the public and collecting a dollar from each listener.

By the way. The famous humorist writer was worried about speaking in front of an audience only twice in his life. He, like all speakers, was very worried before his very first appearance in front of the public. He was haunted by the question of how the public would perceive his words. At that time, Mark Twain worried absolutely in vain! As soon as he uttered the first words: “Julius Caesar is dead. Shakespeare is dead. Napoleon died, and I don’t feel entirely healthy...” - the audience was delighted and gave the writer a stormy ovation. The second time Mark Twain had to worry was after the speech. One young man living in a small American town decided to prank the popular joker Mark Twain. Before the evening lecture, the writer took a walk through the streets of the town. A young man approached him and said that he would be happy to attend the lecture and would bring his uncle with him. But the fact is that no one could ever make an elderly person laugh or even just make him smile. Maybe the great joker Mark Twain will be able to cheer up an unsmiling man? Naturally, Mark Twain accepted the challenge and cordially invited his uncle to an evening performance. In the evening, a young man and his uncle sat in the front row. The writer was at his best during the lecture, he joked and told funny stories. As they say, he simply went out of his way to make his unsmiling uncle laugh. The audience was simply sobbing, and the old man was still sitting, not showing any emotions, and did not even try to smile. Mark Twain was a complete fiasco and left the stage completely exhausted. He failed to amuse the viewer. He was very upset; this incident simply unsettled the writer. A few days later, Mark Twain told a good friend about the disastrous performance. After listening to the writer, the acquaintance said: “Oh, don’t worry. I know this old man. He has been completely deaf for many years now.”

Mark Twain, 1867

Twain achieved his first success as a writer on another journey. In 1867, he begged Colonel McComb to sponsor him for a five-month trip to Europe and the Middle East. In June, as a correspondent for Alta California and the New York Tribune, Twain traveled to Europe on the Quaker City; “Among the 75 passengers of the Quaker City there were 26 ladies who looked sexless and average. During the three months of the voyage, everyone was fed up with their morning services accompanied by a harmonium and their evening magic lanterns with the same transparencies.”

In August, he also visited Odessa, Yalta and Sevastopol (the “Odessa Bulletin” of August 24, 1867 contains the “Address” of American tourists, written by Twain). It’s hard to say jokingly or admiringly, Mark Twain later wrote in his book “Simps Abroad”: “Odessa looks exactly like an American city: beautiful wide streets, our white acacia along the sidewalks, business bustle in the streets and shops. I didn't notice anything that would tell us that we were in Russia. Wherever you look, to the right, to the left, America is everywhere in front of us!” As part of the ship's delegation, Mark Twain visited the residence of the Russian Emperor in Livadia, where they were all invited to breakfast. “They call it breakfast,” Twain sneers. “These were sushi with tea, into which they squeezed lemon or poured ice milk - as you liked.” Mark Twain liked tea with lemon, and he liked it no less than the palace in Livadia: “They are both incomparable!” From Palestine he sent a “gavel” to his lodge, to which was attached a letter in a humorous spirit, in which Twain informed his brothers that “The handle of the gavel was carved by Brother Clemens from the trunk of a Lebanese cedar tree, timely planted by Brother Goffred of Bouillon near the walls Jerusalem." Letters written by Twain while traveling through Europe and Asia were sent to his editor and published in the newspaper, and later formed the basis of the book “Simps Abroad.” The book was published in 1869, distributed by subscription and was a huge success among the reading public due to a rare combination of good southern humor and satire for those years. By the way, the first licensed game from Parker Brothers (1883), later famous for the board game Monopoly, was based on the plot of Twain’s early book “Innocents Abroad.” Thus, Mark Twain's literary debut took place.

In February 1870, at the height of his success from Innocents Abroad, he married the sister of his friend Charles Langdon, whom he had met on an 1867 cruise, Olivia. After seeing a photograph of his sister, Olivia, Twain, in his own words, fell in love at first sight. Mark and Olivia met in 1868 and announced their engagement a year later. When Twain wooed Olivia, her father, a large coal merchant, “rich but liberal,” asked him for recommendations, as was customary then. Twain gave the names of three acquaintances in Nevada and California. To Langdon’s request, one of them wrote: “Talented, but dissolute,” another replied: “Might become an alcoholic and allow the family to become impoverished,” and a third said: “He’ll end up on the gallows.” “Don’t you really have friends who would respond well to you?” - asked Langdon. “There are no decent ones,” Twain replied. Then Langdon smiled and said: “Consider that there is one - me.” Olivia soon became Twain's wife. This union, which united the aristocratic North and the disorderly South, turned out to be happy both in family and creative terms. Among his wife's relatives, as well as her friends, who became Mark Twain's friends, there were abolitionists, socialists, atheists, and women's rights activists, and Mark Twain found targets for his “poisonous” arrows. Thus, the hero of the satire “Letter from a Guardian Angel” was the coal merchant Andrew Langdon, a black businessman hiding behind hypocritical charity, to whom such far from related lines are addressed: “What is the readiness of... ten thousand noblest souls to give their lives for another - in comparison with a gift of fifteen dollars from the most vile and stingy reptile that ever burdened the earth with its presence!” The story was published long after his death - in 1946.

However, on their first wedding night the newlyweds suffered a lot. Livey imagined that her husband would be experienced in a delicate matter, but he himself turned out to be a virgin! So it was she who had to lead the process! But what a price she then charged for it! All intimate relationships were “sharpened” under Livey from the very first moment! Only her desire or reluctance determined whether they would be together today or not. In general, Mark Twain found himself on a leash, and a very short one at that. Pious Olivia called her husband “boy” and was quite strict with him. She forced him, a militant atheist, to pray before eating; did not allow him, a heavy smoker, to smoke at home. But the most unusual thing for such families is that almost everything written by Twain’s hand was subject to harsh editing by his wife. Did your husband like it? Hardly! However, he did not complain: his wife’s command of style was no worse than his, and sometimes her comments seemed very sensible to him. In addition, he believed that his wife was a perfect woman and obeyed her in everything. But in bed... Here she was very stingy and stingy. And although she gave birth to three daughters to Mark Twain, she allowed him to approach the “body” less and less. And he, instead of “strengthening the family,” sadly calculated that a man is able to perform 100 sexual acts annually for 50 years, and a woman is able to perform 3,000 acts annually (an average of 8–9 acts per day) for throughout his life. In a lifetime, therefore, a man is capable of 5,000 acts, and a woman is capable of 150,000. From all these arithmetic calculations, Mark Twain made the following conclusion: every woman should have a harem of a large number of men... He also wrote erotic essays, and secretly from wife, since after her “editing” his sexual “post” would probably have been delayed. His most significant work on this topic is “1601: Fireside Chats.” The Queen of England and her courtiers appear before the readers, who, sitting by the fireplace, exchange stories about their sexual adventures and victories. Or what do you think of Mark Twain’s interesting theory about the candle? “For 23 days every month (unless she is pregnant) from the age of 7 until her death from old age, a woman is ready for active action. She is like a candlestick who is always ready to receive her candle. A man is ready for active action only for a limited period of time. This activity appears in him somewhere around the age of 16, and older men’s actions are no longer of such quality, and the intervals between them become longer and longer, unlike his, say, great-grandmother, who can still do this like a young girl. The candlestick is still ready to receive its candle, but over the years the candle becomes softer and weaker, and then cannot hold straight at all, and in deep sorrow it is laid to eternal rest in the hope of the next Sunday, which, however, never comes.”

Samuel and Olivia Clemens were married for 34 years, until Olivia's death in 1904. The young family lived in Buffalo, New York, where Twain worked for the Buffalo Express newspaper, and in 1871 moved to Hartford, Connecticut. In Hartford, Twain organized the construction of a house in which the Clemens lived until 1891.

It was here that Samuel and Olivia's daughters, Susan (1872-1896), Clara (1874-1962) and Jane (1880-1909) were born (another child, Langdon, born in November 1870, was premature and very weak and a year and a half later died of diphtheria). During this period he often lectured in the USA and England. He then began to write biting satire, sharply criticizing American society and politicians, most notably in the collection Life on the Mississippi, written in 1883. However, until the very end of his life, many knew Twain precisely as the author of “Simps Abroad.” During his writing career, Twain had the opportunity to travel throughout Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia. He made twenty-nine separate transatlantic crossings; around the world via the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans; cruised along the Mediterranean, Caribbean, Black, Caspian, and Aegean seas; crossed India from Bombay to Darjeeling; conquered the Alps and the Tyrolean Black Forest. He sailed along the Neckar and Rhone rivers on a raft; lived and worked for extended periods in London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, as well as in various small European cities and resorts. It was all part of his lifelong need to see and experience new things, a need that in itself was characteristic of being an American. "I moved towards the entrance with the anticipation of a wild man!" - Twain wrote to his mother in 1867, - “My mind gives me peace only in excitement and anxiety when I move from place to place. I would like never to stop in order to settle in any one place.” He rarely did this

Mark Twain's next successful book, co-written with Charles Warner, was The Gilded Age. The work, on the one hand, is not very successful, because the styles of the co-authors were seriously different, but on the other hand, it became so popular with readers that the reign of President Grant was dubbed by its name.

And in 1876, a new book by Mark Twain saw the world, which not only established him as the greatest American writer, but also forever brought his name into the history of world literature. These were the famous "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer". In essence, the writer did not have to invent anything. He remembered his childhood in Hannibal and his life in those years. And so, on the pages of the book, the town of St. Petersburg appeared, in which one can easily discern the features of Hannibal, as well as the features of many other small settlements located along the banks of the Mississippi. And in Tom Sawyer you can easily recognize young Samuel Clemens, who really did not like school and was already smoking at the age of 9.

By the way, according to the writer, “Tom Sawyer” was printed on a semi-experimental sample of “Remington No. 1” under the Sholes & Glidden brand in 1874, but the publishers recalled that, in fact, the first printed text received from Twain was “Life on the Mississippi” written in 1883. However, this contradiction did not stop Remington from using fragments of the “Biography” in its advertising. Later, in his biography, Twain boastfully remarked, “I was the first person to use a typewriter in literature.” Telling such a funny story. While in Boston, the writer discovered an interesting unit in a store window. When he went inside, the salesman showed how the machine worked and assured that it was capable of typing 57 words per minute. To prove this, he called the girl, and Mark Twain timed it. The girl actually typed 57 words in 60 seconds! They repeated the experiment again and again, but she was able to repeat this result. Twain bought a typewriter for $125 and eagerly rushed to the hotel. He took with him the pages on which the girl had typed. When he unfolded them in the room, he realized: the girl always typed the same sentence to save time. And since the machine typed “blindly” - the letters hit the roller with paper from below - the clever seller managed to defraud Mark Twain himself. However, this only amused the writer. With enthusiasm, he began to practice on his first typewriter.

The success of the book exceeded all expectations. The book, filled with simple humor and written in accessible language, appealed to a wide mass of ordinary Americans. After all, in Tom many recognized themselves in a distant and carefree childhood. Twain consolidated this recognition of his readers with his next book, which was also not designed for the sophisticated minds of literary critics. The story “The Prince and the Pauper,” which was published in 1882, takes readers to Tudor-era England. Exciting adventures are combined in this story with the dream of an ordinary American to get rich. The average reader liked it.

The historical topic interested the writer. In the preface to his new novel, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain wrote: “If anyone is inclined to condemn our modern civilization, well, it cannot be prevented from doing so, but it is good to sometimes draw a comparison between it and what has been going on in the world.” earlier, and this should reassure and inspire hope.”

Twain was passionate about science and scientific problems. He was very friendly with Nikola Tesla, they spent a lot of time together in Tesla's laboratory. In his work A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain describes a journey through time that brought many modern technologies to Arthurian England.

In addition, Mark Twain met with Thomas Edison. The writer even received several patents, including for “Improved adjustable, removable clothing belts” (a kind of suspenders). The nature of the invention, according to the writer himself, was “an adjustable and removable elastic strap for vests, trousers and other products requiring belts.” But the ingenious invention, invented by the most brilliant creator, is today used in slightly different clothes... in the manufacture of bras, and even today! Neither buttons nor ties are so ideal for holding a woman's breasts so correctly. Also, back in the middle of the 19th century, Twain discovered that the usual glue with which he attached the clippings to the pages of the album had many disadvantages - it stained his hands, the clippings and the pages themselves. The writer came up with the idea of ​​making a thin strip of adhesive on each page of the album to make it easier to add and replace elements. He received a patent for his "self-adhesive" album in 1872, and his idea immediately became popular. A well-known American newspaper claimed that this discovery brought Mark Twain $50,000, which was a huge amount compared to his fees for all the books he wrote - $200,000. This was Mark Twain's only invention that brought him a monetary reward. Even today, self-adhesive inserts are used on the pages of photo and scrapbooking albums. However, we can thank Mark Twain for another very useful invention - it was the young journalist Clemens who invented and made the world's first notebook with tear-off pages. There was also a wardrobe with sliding shelves, as well as the most ingenious of his inventions - a tie-tying machine. On August 18, 1885, Mark Twain patented his game for training memory using various facts and figures. Unfortunately, the game turned out to be too difficult for ordinary people, and Twain's instructions were too general, and the game did not gain much popularity. Twain truly believed in the value of the patent system. In his book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Hank Morgan, one of the Yankees, said, “The very first thing I did in my administration—and this was on the very first day—I created a patent office. Because I knew that a country without a patent office and strong patent laws is not a country, but a complete irritation.”

Until 1884, Mark Twain was already a famous writer, and also became a successful businessman. He established a publishing firm, nominally headed by C. L. Webster, the husband of his niece. One of the first books published by his own publishing house was his “The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin.” The work, which, according to critics, became the best in the work of Mark Twain, was conceived as a continuation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. However, it turned out to be much more complex and multi-layered. It reflected the fact that the writer created it for almost 10 years. And these years were filled with a constant search for the best literary form, polishing the language and deep reflection. In this book, Twain used the colloquial language of the American hinterland for the first time in American literature. Once upon a time it was allowed to be used only in farce and satire on the customs of the common people. Among other books published by Mark Twain's publishing house, one can name “Memoirs” of the eighteenth US President V.S. Grant. They became a bestseller and brought the desired financial well-being to the family of Samuel Clemens.

Mark Twain's publishing company existed successfully until the famous economic crisis of 1893-1894. The writer's business could not withstand the severe blow and went bankrupt. Back in 1891, Mark Twain was forced to move to Europe in order to save money: “The only difference between a taxman and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.” Mark Twain came to the conclusion: you should refrain from trading in securities in two cases - if you do not have funds and if you do have them. He closed his home in Hartford and first went to Europe with his family and then went on a world lecture tour. It turned out to be surprisingly successful, which allowed him to pay off his creditors in full by January 1898, which, by the way, he was not obliged to do after declaring himself bankrupt. From time to time he comes to the United States, trying to improve his financial situation. After the ruin, he does not recognize himself as bankrupt for a long time. Ultimately, he manages to negotiate with creditors to defer payment of debts.

Mark Twain and Henry Rogers. 1908

In 1893, Twain was introduced to oil magnate Henry Rogers, one of the directors of Standard Oil. Rogers helped Twain profitably reorganize his financial affairs by transferring Twain's debts to himself, allowing him to pay them off gradually. They soon became close friends, it turned out that in some ways they were very close: similar childhood, upbringing, the same greed for life and love for word games. At the same time, each admired in the other what he himself did not have. Journalists pestered Twain with questions about what he was talking about with Rogers, and the writer replied: “He gives me advice on how to write better, and I give him advice on how to better manage financial affairs. But we both turned out to be bad students.” Twain wrote to Rogers: "You and I are a team. You are the most useful person I know, and I am the most ornamental." When Twain sometimes walked into the grim offices of Standard Oil, the most arid officials showed signs of life, even the secretary, nicknamed "the sphinx." Twain often visited Rogers, they drank and played poker. You could say that Twain even became a member of the family for the Rogers. Rogers took Twain on his yacht to Bermuda, drove him in a car, and settled him in his house when the writer was overcome by despondency. Mark Twain said: “Yes, he is a pirate. But I only dreamed of becoming a pirate.” They loved each other like brothers - like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, only now rich and famous." Rogers' sudden death in 1909 deeply shocked Twain. Although Mark Twain publicly thanked Rogers many times for saving him from financial ruin, it became clear that they the friendship was mutually beneficial. Apparently, Twain significantly influenced the softening of the harsh temper of the oil tycoon, who had the nickname “Cerberus Rogers.” After Rogers’ death, his papers showed that his friendship with the famous writer turned a ruthless miser into a real philanthropist and philanthropist. Rogers began to actively support education, organizing educational programs, especially for African Americans and talented people with disabilities. During this time, Mark Twain wrote several works, including his most serious historical prose, “Personal Memoirs of Joan of Arc by Sieur Louis de Comte.” , Her Page and Secretary" (1896), which he called his favorite work, as well as "Simp Wilson" (1894), "Tom Sawyer Abroad" (1894) and "Tom Sawyer the Detective" (1896). But none of them achieved the success that accompanied Twain's previous books.

The writer's star was inexorably sliding towards decline. At the end of the 19th century, a collection of Mark Twain’s works began to be published in the United States, thereby elevating him to the category of classics of bygone days. However, the bitter boy who sat inside the elderly, already completely gray-haired Samuel Clemens did not think of giving up. Mark Twain entered the twentieth century with a sharp satire on the powers that be. The writer marked the stormy revolutionary beginning of the century with works designed to expose untruth and injustice: “To the Man Who Walks in Darkness,” “The United Lynching States,” “To My Missionary Critics,” “In Defense of General Funston,” in which he spoke out against American imperialist policies and military clergy, Then came “The Tsar’s Monologue” (a caustic satire on the Russian autocracy; 1905), “The Monologue of King Leopold in Defense of His Dominion in the Congo” (outrage at the Belgian colonial regime in the Congo), etc. A period began in Mark Twain’s work that can be called changing milestones. He became disillusioned with bourgeois democracy, noting in his notebook: “The majority is always wrong,” rejected American patriotism, which, in his opinion, poisoned the consciousness of many of his compatriots (“...the merchant spirit replaced morality, everyone became only a patriot of his own pocket,” - wrote Mark Twain), lost faith in American progress and its special mission: “Sixty years ago, “optimist” and “fool” were not synonymous. Here is the greatest revolution, greater than that produced by science and technology. Great changes in sixty years has not happened since the creation of the world." Subjecting his “selfish, cowardly and hypocritical” contemporaries to fierce criticism, he admired the “thorny path” of Russian revolutionaries, as he reported in a letter to the populist revolutionary Stepnyak-Kravchinsky. But in the minds of Americans, Twain remained a classic of “light” literature.

In 1901 he received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Yale University. Next year, an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Missouri. In 1907, the 72-year-old writer was invited to Oxford to receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. He was very proud of these titles. For a man who left school at the age of 12, the recognition of his talent by the pundits of famous universities flattered him.

Twain was a prominent figure in the American Anti-Imperial League, which protested the American annexation of the Philippines. In response to these events, in which approximately 600 people died, Twain wrote a pamphlet, The Philippine Incident, but the work was not published until 1924, 14 years after his death. From time to time, some of Twain's works were banned by American censors for various reasons. This was mainly due to the active civic and social position of the writer. Twain did not publish some works that could offend people's religious feelings at the request of his family. One of Twain's most controversial works was a humorous lecture at a Paris club, published under the title "Reflections on the Science of Onanism." The central idea of ​​the lecture was: “If you have to risk your life on the sexual front, then don’t masturbate too much.” The essay was published only in 1943 in a limited edition of 50 copies. Several more anti-religious works remained unpublished until the 1940s. In the 2000s, attempts were again made in the United States to ban the novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” due to naturalistic descriptions and verbal expressions that were offensive to blacks. Although Twain was an opponent of racism and imperialism and went much further in his rejection of racism than his contemporaries, many words that were in common use in Mark Twain's time and used by him in the novel do now sound like racial slurs. В феврале 2011 года в США вышло первое издание книг Марка Твена «Приключения Гекльберри Финна» и «Приключения Тома Сойера», в котором подобные слова и выражения заменены на политкорректные (например, слово «nigger» (негр) заменено по тексту на «slave» (slave)). Twain himself treated censorship with irony. When the Massachusetts public library decided to remove The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from collection in 1885, Twain wrote to his publisher: "They have removed Huck from the library as 'slum trash,' and we will undoubtedly sell another 25,000 copies because of it." "

At this time, he was already seriously ill, and most of his family members were dying one after another - he experienced the loss of three of his four children, and his beloved wife Olivia also died. When Olivia became hopelessly ill, he posted notes throughout the house with comic instructions just to cheer up his wife. Even in the trees opposite her bedroom window, he hung instructions for the birds so that they would not sing too loudly... Twain was very bored without his wife and grandchildren, feeling abandoned. But even though he was deeply depressed, he could still joke. In response to an erroneous obituary in the New York Journal, he uttered his famous phrase: “Rumors of my death are somewhat exaggerated.”

Twain's only remaining daughter, Clara, often toured the world and created many problems for her father. Until some point, she, who firmly believed in her talent, tormented her father with demands to pay for her tours, the best teachers, and invited soloists. All this cost a huge amount of money! But Clara was not a pianist. Her personal life was also awkward: Twain’s daughter often changed lovers, wasting her father’s money on them. Stories with boyfriends were actively discussed by the press, and Twain was ready to write any check just to prevent another scandal. And suddenly, pianist Osip Gabrilovich, a native of Russia, appeared on Clara’s horizon. Twain himself acted as matchmaker. He personally officiated at their wedding - almost underground, secretly from onlookers. Twain himself wrote a press release entitled “A Happy Wedding is a Tragedy,” explaining that marriage always poisons life. In a letter to a friend, he said: “Gabrilovich did me a huge service - he destroyed Clara’s career. I pray that this will be forever." Clara actually left the stage. Perhaps she felt the insignificance of her talent next to the brilliant acting of her husband...

with Dorothy Quick aboard the Minnetonka. July 1907 from the Library of Congress. Department of Prints and Photographs

With the young poetess Dorothy Quick

With Irene Gerken. New York Times, April 19, 1908

Irene Gerken and Clemens in carts, donkey-drawn, Bermuda 1908. Photo from the collection of Kevin Mac Donnell.

Samuel Clemens, Henry H. Rogers and Irene Gerken at the Princess Hotel in Bermuda

with Dorothy Harvey and her father George Harvey

With Louise Payne and Dorothy Harvey. 1908

M. Twain and the “angel fish” at the opening of the library named after him in 1908.

with Helen Allen. Bermuda, 1908.

with Margaret Gray Blackmer. Bermuda, 1908

with Paddy Madden. Photo from the Mark Twain archives, University of California at Berkeley

with Frances Nunnally. Later this picture was on the dressing table in his bedroom

After the death of his wife, which followed in 1904, Mark Twain began to develop a morbid interest in little girls. And this despite the fact that his “candle”, due to its too rare use, was “laid into eternal rest” at the age of 50, or in the seventeenth year of his married life. “I suppose we are all collectors... For me, I collect favorites: young girls - from 10 to 16 years old; sweet and nice, cheerful - dear creatures, for whom life consists entirely of pleasure, and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, no tears.” He even organized a club, which he called “Aquarium”. The members of the club were the daughters of his friends and acquaintances, whom he called after tropical fish - Angel Fish - because “these are the most beautiful fish that swim.” So what exactly was the writer doing at the age of 70 with the little girls who made up his collection? All those ordinary, sweet things that grandfathers do with their granddaughters. Clemens took them to theaters, to concerts, brought them to his home and played cards with them, taught them to play billiards, and read books with them. Several times passers-by noticed the elderly writer with a bunch of little girls who followed him like a train. Clemens never stopped communicating with his angelfish, writing letters to them when they could not visit him in person, and always keeping a special room for them in his house where they could be "for as long as Thrift would allow" (meaning parents girls). This was said for a reason, since when visiting the writer, the girls were always with accompanying persons (parents, guardians, nannies). The Angelfish room always had an even number of beds so that the girls could sleep next to their nannies or guardians.

In 1991, Daniel Petrie made the film Mark Twain and Me based on Dorothy Quick's autobiographical novel The Rapture.

Twain even named his mansion “Innocence” in honor of his “fishes” and each of them had a permanent invitation to visit his house. In addition to all this, he also rebuilt his billiard room into a special room of the Aquarium Club, where a dressing table with photographs of all members of the community stood in honor. Mark Twain explained this relationship by saying that he had reached the age of a grandfather without grandchildren and had only a “miserable sea of ​​banquets and harangues” to replenish his “dry and dusty” heart. He was their ideal grandfather. Once, while visiting someone, he was dressing in the hallway and said, looking in the mirror: “How I would dream of having such a grandfather!” Despite all the innocence of the famous writer’s hobby, if one of today’s celebrities tried to start their own “Aquarium Club”, this case would turn out to be a tasty morsel for the press, and that celebrity would immediately be accused of a ton of disgusting and immoral acts, no matter is it true or not. In Clemens's day, no one was outraged by his actions, and more and more parents appeared who wanted to introduce their young daughters to the kind and sympathetic writer grandfather.

However, he probably did not have sex with any other woman except his wife. After her death, he was attacked by Isabelle Lyon, who had been his secretary for many years. As a woman, Isabelle disgusted him. In a letter to a friend, Twain wrote: “I simply cannot go to bed with Miss Lyon. I’d rather do it with some dummy made of wax.” At the same time, Isabelle Lyon managed to irritate everyone she encountered. The artist who painted Twain's portrait complained that she "constantly hangs around and behaves with strangers with lackey arrogance." Twain's daughter Clara caught her wearing the late Olivia's jewelry. The writer's lawyer watched with alarm as Miss Lyon and the second secretary, Ralph Ashcroft, gradually took control of the writer's finances, having obtained from him a power of attorney for access to his money. "The boundaries of their relationship were never made clear and seemed to change depending on Twain's mood. A woman with an attractive, sensitive face; a woman of passionate feelings hidden behind a cautious manner, she treated the old writer with the tenderness and patience of a wife. She consoled, played playing cards with him, keeping an eye on his clothes, serving him drinks, drying his hair after his bath. Many were sure that she was aiming for Mrs. Clemens’s place.”

Another of Twain's passions is billiards. Over the years, my passion for my favorite game only grew. One day, having arrived at twelve at night from celebrating his seventy-third birthday, he invited his friend to play a short game, and they played so hard that they only came to their senses from the roar of the milkman’s cans when they saw that it was already about five in the morning. But even then Twain didn’t really want to let his friend go. In addition to billiards, Twain was very fond of the card game “wet chicken.” There was an unwritten law in his house: all guests must play either cards or billiards. If someone openly expressed contempt for such a pleasant and pious pastime, he had no chance of a second visit to Twain's house. However, sometimes the classic man worked at the billiard table - the writer’s biographer Albert Bigelow recalled that he more than once saw a billiard table strewn with manuscripts in Mark Twain’s house. The writer also loved to tell anecdotal life stories related to billiards: “When I worked for pennies as a freelance reporter, I often filled my pocket by fleecing naive visiting newcomers. Until I ran into a worthy opponent who taught me a lesson - witty and lightning fast. To the bar a guy comes in, freckled, red-haired and cross-eyed - I immediately disliked him, comes up to the table and offers a bet: they say, he will beat me with his left hand. I never refuse easy money, the game begins, he scores on the first hit, puts all the balls in order. pockets, and all that remains for me is to rub the cue with chalk. I give him the jackpot and say: If you can play like that with your left hand, then what does your right hand do? And he answers: Almost nothing.

In 1906, Twain acquired a personal secretary, who became A.B. Payne. The young man expressed his desire to write a book about the writer’s life. However, Mark Twain had already sat down to write his autobiography several times. As a result, the writer begins to dictate the story of his life to Payne.

In 1906, Twain had four years to live. During this time he built a mansion in Connecticut; helped organize a children's theater, wrote a lot of essays and stories (including the poignant “A Dog's Tale,” which begins: “My father is a St. Bernard, my mother is a Collie, and I myself am a Presbyterian.”) Twain traveled and was friends with Willa Cather and Woodrow Wilson; flirted with the most beautiful actresses on Broadway; made a splash in public debates about female sexuality; was deceived in love, experienced a scandal, and found a brother in the person of his principled enemy. Having no grandchildren of his own, he surrounded himself with strangers. Having no future, he was inspired by the past. "Autobiography" On New Year's Eve from 1906 to 1907, at the premises of the New York Electric Music Company, the crowd listened to how a new instrument - the electric Telharmonium played a New Year's song based on the poems of Burns Auld Lang Syne. The first session of transmitting music over telephone wires took place. Twain was the first subscriber to the new service, and on New Year’s Eve he hosted 3 dozen guests and reporters for a musical evening. He opened it with a short speech: “Such inventions have one drawback - they interfere with our plans. For example, having learned about a new technical miracle, I postponed my death. I cannot leave this world until I have mastered all its wonders."

James Page typesetting machine

Twain's financial situation also deteriorated: his publishing company went bankrupt; he invested a lot of money in a new model of a printing press (or rather, a typesetting machine), which was never put into production (over 11 years, he spent $150 thousand on Page's typesetting machine - $4 million in today's equivalent); Plagiarists stole the rights to several of his books.

Twain was a heavy smoker (he is the author of the phrase that is now attributed to everyone: “There is nothing easier than quitting smoking. I know, I’ve done it a thousand times”). He started smoking when he was eight years old and smoked 20 to 40 cigars daily until his death. The writer chose the smelliest and cheapest cigars. In his room there were always 20-30 pipes filled with tobacco so that he could smoke them one after another without interrupting his work. Most likely, this is why the writer was tormented by severe attacks of angina pectoris, because of which his heart eventually gave out and Mark Twain died on April 24, 1910 at the age of 74. His last trip was to Bermuda, where he lived with his angelfish Helen Allen. There he became ill: his nose began to bleed. Everyone rushed, some for a towel, some for water, some for the doctor, and Twain said to Helen: “And you run and bring paper and pencil to write down my last words.” He left urgently so that his death would not cause trouble to his hospitable hosts. And one of his last three photographs is with a girl who is laughing with her head thrown back. The next one is in a chair, on the gangway of the ship. The next one is in a white suit, in a coffin.

Upon learning of Twain's death, US President William Taft said: "Mark Twain gave pleasure - real intellectual pleasure - to millions. His works will continue to give such pleasure to millions ... His humor was American, but it was also appreciated by the British and representatives of other countries ... He became a part of American literature forever." At Mark Twain's grave in Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York, there is a monument two fathoms high, a tribute to the famous pseudonym. But perhaps the best monument is his books, which remain with us forever. His last work, the satirical story “The Mysterious Stranger,” was published posthumously in 1916 from an unfinished manuscript. This story can be considered Mark Twain's manifesto, completing his creative life. In fact, three versions of it have survived. Back in 1899, he wrote to his friend, the American writer W.D. Gowells that he intends to stop literary work for a living and take up his main book: “... in which I will not limit myself in anything, I will not be afraid that I will hurt the feelings of others, or take into account their prejudices ... in which I will express everything , what I think... frankly, without looking back..." The writer put his evil satirical laughter with superhuman seductions and his thoughts into the mouth of the main character of the story - Satan.

One letter from Twain to an unknown correspondent states:
"...When I try to depict life, I limit myself to those areas of it with which I am familiar. But I limited myself only to the life of a boy on the Mississippi because it holds a special charm for me, and not because I do not know the life of adults. At the beginning of the war I spent two weeks as a soldier, and all this time I was hunted like a rat. Am I familiar with the life of a soldier?..
Besides, I spent several weeks moving silver ore at a processing plant and learned about all the latest cultural achievements in this area...
Besides, I was a gold digger and can tell a rich breed from a poor one just by tasting it on my tongue.
And besides, I was a miner in silver mines and I know how to beat rock, shovel it, drill wells and put dynamite in them...
And besides, I was a reporter for four years and saw the behind-the-scenes side of many events...
And besides, I served for several years as a pilot on the Mississippi and was closely acquainted with all varieties of rivermen - a unique tribe and unlike any other.
And besides, for several years I was an itinerant printer and moved from one city to another...
And besides, for many years I gave public lectures and made speeches at all kinds of banquets...
And besides, I followed the development of an invention dear to my heart for many years, spent a fortune on it, and failed to bring it to completion...
Besides, I'm a publisher...
And besides, I’ve been a writer for twenty years now, and a donkey for fifty-five years.
Well, so: since the most valuable capital, culture and erudition necessary for writing novels, is personal experience, I am therefore well equipped for this craft.
Twain's letter, excerpted above, dates back to 1891. The writer lived for almost twenty more years. And over the years he had the opportunity to experience a lot. If Twain, at the end of his days, had decided to supplement the letter sent in the early 90s with new facts, he would also have the right to write the following:
Besides, I was a rich man and bankrupt.
And besides, the last years of my life were devoted to a fierce struggle against American imperialism.
And besides, I continued to fight with religious superstitions, with God and with all those who do evil, hiding behind the name of God...
Yes, the life of the American writer was full of many events, unusually rich in contrasts!

A brilliant humorist and joker, Twain remains true to himself even after death. The last book he wrote was an autobiography. According to the writer’s wishes, the first volume of the autobiography was published only 100 years after his death, in November 2010 (and instantly became a bestseller). The second volume should be published 25 years after the first (that is, in 2035), and the third - after another 25 years (in 2060).

In the city of Hannibal, Missouri, the house where Twain played as a boy has been preserved, and the caves that he explored as a child and which were later described in the famous “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” are now visited by tourists. Mark Twain's house in Hartford has been turned into his personal museum and declared a national historical treasure in the United States.

Since 1998, the Kennedy Center (Washington) has awarded the annual Mark Twain Award for achievements in the American humor industry, which has received Oscar status during this time. The first laureate was Richard Pryor. Then it was awarded to Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, George Carlin, Ellen DeGeneres, Will Ferrell, Steve Martin, Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, Jonathan Winters, Lily Tomlin, Carol Burnett and Tina Fey. Crystal (2007), flattered by the recognition, couldn’t resist a joke in his response: “As my grandfather used to say, if you push around in a shop for a long time, sooner or later you’ll get something.” In 2015, the award winner was actor Eddie Murphy, who staged a small humorous show on October 18, during the award ceremony. Receiving the award, he asked: "Is it a prize or a reward? If it is a prize, there is usually some money associated with it. For future recipients: if you don't want to call it an award, you can call it a surprise - a surprise in the sense that You don't get any money."

Mark Twain Masonic Awareness Award

There is also the Mark Twain Readers' Award, or simply the Mark Twain Award, which, since 1972, has been awarded annually to one book selected by a vote of Missouri schoolchildren from a list prepared by volunteer readers and librarians.

Portrait of Mark Twain by James Beckwith

The image of Mark Twain in popular culture

Samuel Clemens's childhood is described in Miriam Mason's biographical stories "The Boy from the Great Mississippi" and "The Young Writer."

As a literary hero, Mark Twain (under his real name Samuel Clemens) appears in the second and third parts of the science fiction pentalogy “Riverworld” by writer Philip José Farmer. In the second book, entitled “The Fairytale Ship,” Samuel Clemens, revived in the mysterious World of the River along with all the people who died at different times on Earth, becomes an explorer and adventurer. He dreams of building a large paddle-wheeled river steamer to sail along the River to its very source. Over time, he succeeds, but after construction, the writer’s ship is stolen by his partner, King John the Landless. In book three, entitled “Dark Designs,” Clemens, overcoming numerous difficulties, completes the construction of a second steamship, which they also try to steal from him.

In two film adaptations of the series, filmed in 2003 and 2010, the role of Samuel Clemens was played by actors Cameron Deidou and Mark Deklin.

In Robert Heinlein's 1987 novel Sail Beyond the Sunset, the main character mentions several times her meetings with Lazarus Long's family friend (the main character), Samuel Clemens, including his words about Halley's Comet.

Sesh Heri's novel "The Miracle of the World" (2005) tells how Twain set off with Harry Houdini and Nikola Tesla in 1893 on a journey to Mars.

The main character of the novel The Fire of Eden (1994) by Dan Simmons, Eleanor, repeats the journey of her Aunt Kidder and her traveling companion Clemens to the Sandwich Islands. The book alternates between Eleanor's contemporary experiences and those described in Samuel Clemens' diary.

V. P. Krapivin’s story “The Siege Has Long Ended...” describes the meeting of the protagonist with Samuel Clemens during a visit to Sevastopol in 1867.

Twain is mentioned in Tom Petty's song "Down South" from his album Highway Companion (2006).

Fredric March as Mark Twain "The Adventures of Mark Twain", 1944

Hal Holbrook in "Mark Twain Today!" (1967)

Oleg Tabakov in the film. Mikhail Grigoriev "Mark Twain against..." (1975)

Evgeny Steblov as Mark Twain. television play "The Stories of Mark Twain" (1976)

Val Kilmer as Mark Twain film "Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy", 2013

As for film adaptations and theatrical productions based on the works of Mark Twain, it is very difficult to count them (there is even a Japanese anime and a video with Barbie “The Princess and the Beggar Woman”). There were also lifetime film adaptations, the scripts for which were co-written by Mark Twain himself: “Tom Sawyer” (1907, together with Jane Gontier) and “The Prince and the Pauper” (1909, together with J. Searle Dawley), in which he played himself .

A crater on Mercury and asteroid 2362, discovered on September 24, 1976, are named in honor of Twain. And at the same time, the Washoe Indians opposed the Nevada State Board on Geographic Names naming a bay on the northeastern shore of Lake Tahoe after Mark Twain. He worked in a mine in his youth, as they believe that the writer had racist views towards Native Americans, which he expressed in his work. In particular, the head of the department of cultural heritage of the Washoe Tribe, Darrel Cruz, pointed out that Twain was opposed to naming the lake the word Tahoe, which is derived from the expression “da ow” from the Washoe dictionary, citing a quote from Twain: “They say that the word “Tahoe” means “Silver Lake”, “Crystal Water”, “Autumn Leaf”. Nonsense! This word means “Grasshopper Soup” - a favorite dish of the Kopache tribe, and the Paiutes too. According to Cruz, the Washoe Indians did not like being compared to the "digger tribe," a derogatory term applied to some tribes in the West who ate dug roots, other tribes ate grasshoppers. Thomas Quirk, professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri and a leading authority on Mark Twain, noted that the writer eventually overcame his racism against blacks. However, Quirk said he found no evidence that Twain significantly changed his views on American Indians. "As far as African Americans are concerned, he was way ahead of his time. As far as Native Americans are concerned, his record is not very good," Quirk said. So far, only a private hotel, whose owner was sympathetic to the artistic concept and did not go to extremes, carries Mark Twain's name.

But the only street in Russia named after Mark Twain is located in Volgograd.

If you decide to sit next to the great writer and “talk” with him, then you can do this in:

"Good friends, good books and a sleeping conscience - this is the ideal life." Monrovia (California), USA.

"Thousands of geniuses live and die unknown - either unrecognized by others, or unrecognized by ourselves." Fort Worth (Texas), USA

“The right to stupidity is one of the guarantees of the free development of the individual.” San Diego (California), USA

“The worst loneliness is when a person is uncomfortable with himself.” Newark (Ohio), USA

"Once in a lifetime, fortune knocks on every person's door, but at this time a person is often sitting in the nearest pub and doesn't hear any knocking." Dubuque (Iowa), USA

"At fifty a man can be an ass without being an optimist, but he can no longer be an optimist without being an ass." Fairfield (Connecticut), USA

"We like people who boldly tell us whatever they think, provided that they think the same as we do." Santa Fe (New Mexico), USA

"There is no more pathetic sight than a man explaining his joke." Rifle (Colorado), USA

"Often the surest way to mislead a person is tell him the honest truth." Houston (Texas), USA

"It's better to remain silent and look like a fool, than to speak and dispel all doubts." in the city park, near the Kansas Public Library

On this day in 1863 Englishman Frederick Walton received a patent for the production of linoleum. The name comes from the Latin words linum - flax, linen and oleum - oil. The ancestor of linoleum was “oiled canvas,” the production process of which looked like this: a hot mixture of resin, oleoresin, brown Spanish dye, beeswax and linseed oil was applied to the fabric. Then they began to add ground cork to this mixture.

Further improvement of the process and the desire to reduce the cost of components led to the replacement of expensive components with linseed oil, then linseed oil, and finally linoxin. In 1863, Frederick Walton, an English industrialist and inventor, patented an improved technology for the production of linoxin and flooring based on it - linoleum. Three years later, its industrial production began, quickly spreading throughout the world.

It should be noted that the linoleum production process has not changed much since the time of Frederick Walton: linseed oil is oxidized to form a special mixture called linoleum cement, then the mixture is cooled and mixed with pine resin and wood chips to form linoleum sheets.

Mark Twain and his invention - suspenders

On this day in 1871, the American Samuel Clemens, better known to us as Mark Twain, received a patent for “Improved adjustable detachable clothing belts” - a kind of suspenders. The invention consisted of an adjustable strap that was fastened to the buttons of trousers, shirts or a woman's corset and tightened them at the waist.

Mark Twain was always very interested in the achievements of science and technology. He was a close friend of the famous inventor Nikola Tesla and spent a lot of time in his laboratory. Twain also communicated with Thomas Edison. In 1909, during a visit to Twain's estate in Connecticut, Edison captured his companion in a silent video, which is currently the only recording of the famous writer that has survived to this day.

A brilliant humorist and joker, Twain remains true to himself even after death. The last book he wrote was an autobiography. According to the writer’s wishes, the first volume of the autobiography was published only a hundred years after his death, in November 2010 (and instantly became a bestseller). The second volume should be published twenty-five years after the first (that is, in 2035), and the third another twenty-five years later (in 2060).

It is hard to imagine that American patent law predates the current United States itself—the first patent law was passed in the spring of 1790, and the first patent for an important invention, the cotton gin, was issued on March 14, 1794. Over the course of two centuries, humanity has gone from patenting simple mechanisms to patenting bacteria, animals and individual human components. There is only one step left before a patent on people.

In the spring of 1793, friends of her late husband, retired majors, visited Katherine Greene's estate in Georgia. After lunch, they discussed the most pressing issue - how to manage the plantations so that they generate income. The guests grew cotton, and they constantly had to choose between two evils: one type of cotton, in which the seeds are easily separated from the fibers, grows only on the coast, and another variety thrives in the highlands - but is not industrially profitable, since the seeds are separated by hand with great difficulty . Now, if it were possible to come up with a way to easily glean mountain cotton, what kind of income could be generated... Mrs. Green, who listened attentively to them, suggested turning to her new mechanic, Ellie Whitney, for help - she believed that his technical genius could solve this problem .

Commissioners for the promotion of crafts
Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution states that Congress shall provide "to promote the advancement of the sciences and arts, by granting to authors and inventors for limited periods the exclusive rights in their works and inventions." The Constitution was ratified by nine states in June 1788, and in January 1790, Congress appointed a committee to develop patent law. Two and a half months later, the first patent law was signed into law by the first American President, George Washington. By this time, only 12 states had recognized the constitution.
The first patent law did not provide for the creation of a special patent office. Applications for patents had to be addressed to the Secretary of State. The received applications were considered by a commission of three people who called themselves “authorized to promote the development of crafts”: the Secretary of State, the Minister of Defense and the Prosecutor General. The commissioners had to decide by a majority vote whether they considered the invention or discovery to be “sufficiently useful and important.” The main criteria, of course, were the novelty of the proposed invention and its non-obviousness to a specialist knowledgeable in this field. The applicant was required to provide a detailed written description of the invention accompanied by drawings, technical drawings and a working model. Thus, an inventor who wished to obtain a patent was required to make all the details and secrets of his invention public so that after the patent expired, others could benefit from it.
The first American patent was issued on July 31, 1790 to a certain Samuel Hopkins. The patent, signed by George Washington, certified Hopkins' priority in inventing a method for producing potash from wood ash for further use as an agricultural fertilizer. By the end of 1790, only three patents had been issued. Thomas Jefferson wrote later that he could not have imagined the wave of applications that would fall on the heads of the three commissioners.

Feeling the responsibility entrusted to them, patent givers showed great pickiness, forcing authors to redo applications many times. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was tormented by his conscience: due to many other matters, he did not have time to pay enough attention to patents; many worthy proposals waited a long time for consideration. Patent applicants, naturally, were also outraged by the complexity of the procedure and the bias of those who decided their fate. In 1791, for example, several people received patents for the invention of the steamboat, although one of the applicants, John Fitch, applied for a patent before the passage of the Patent Act and even before the adoption of the Constitution. Four competitors who simultaneously received patents for the same invention found themselves broke: none of them could count on receiving loans, since none of them had exclusive rights to the steamship. Only after the expiration of these meaningless patents was a new one issued, this time the only one on the basis of which it already made sense to develop production.
And yet, patents (as a kind of transaction between the inventor and the state) were an undoubted step forward and, in general, a sign of a developed civilization. Abraham Lincoln, the only patent-holder president in US history, saw an almost philosophical meaning in patents: “The patent system added fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” The rules of the game are simple: the inventor receives a temporary monopoly on his invention in exchange for full disclosure of information about it. What the lack of patent rights threatens humanity is clearly demonstrated by the history of the invention of obstetric forceps.

Barbers-obstetricians and the Queen of England
In late 16th-century England, physicians and surgeons belonged to two different professions—surgeons were considered a type of barber, and physicians were prohibited from practicing surgery. It so happened that Peter Chamberlain Sr., the court surgeon of Queen Anne of England, invented obstetric forceps, thanks to which he became extremely popular as an obstetrician. The doctors were so jealous of him that they accused him of illegal medical practice, for which he was liable to imprisonment. Only thanks to the personal intervention of the queen (who already had the opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of his invention) was Peter Chamberlain released. Until his death in 1631, Chamberlain Sr. kept his secret, saving women in labor in cases where they died with other obstetricians.
The secret of obstetric forceps was inherited first by the discoverer's younger brother, and then by his nephew, who was the first in the family to receive a medical diploma. This doctor, Peter Chamberlain, was not only an excellent obstetrician, but also a good businessman. By that time, it was already known that he helped women in labor with a special instrument and asked for a high fee for this. The monopoly on obstetric forceps continued in the next generation of Chamberlain doctors. In 1670, one of Dr. Peter's three sons offered to sell the family secret to the personal physician of the King of France, but the deal did not take place. The secret was eventually sold to an Amsterdam physician, who maintained a monopoly on obstetric services in Amsterdam for almost 60 years, until another Dutch doctor revealed the secret of obstetric forceps in 1732. So for 130 years, thousands of women in Europe died in childbirth only because the Chamberlain clan knew no other way to profit from their invention except to keep it secret.

Cat's Paw, Gun Parts, and the Civil War
About 50 patents were issued under the first patent law in the United States. In 1793, the second patent law appeared. This time the pendulum swung from overly strict requirements of the patenting authority to complete freedom for inventors. The commission of three patent commissioners was abolished. The responsibility for registering patents was assigned to the State Department, and applications were now subject to exclusively formal requirements, subject to which the patent was automatically registered, and it was up to the courts to determine its validity.
The first important invention patented under the 1793 Act was the Allie Whitney cotton gin, which he created at the request of Catherine Greene. It must be said that the miracle mechanic Ellie Whitney and Katherine Green were connected by a romantic story. According to one version that has reached us, Catherine, the widow of Revolutionary War hero General Nathaniel Greene, and Yale College graduate Ellie Whitney met on a ship. Whitney received his education quite late, when he was in his late thirties, and could not find work. One day, together with his Yale classmate Miller, he sailed to Georgia. Miller, who worked as Mrs. Green's manager, introduced Whitney to her. Upon arrival in Georgia, Mrs. Green, on Miller's recommendation, invited Whitney to her place - to teach children, repair equipment and have pleasant conversations.
History is silent about the teaching activities of Ellie Whitney; his love for the charming hostess remained unrequited (she married Miller), but his technical achievements exceeded his wildest expectations - Whitney became famous as the inventor who marked the beginning of the industrial revolution.
Having received the task from Catherine to think about cotton, the first thing Ellie Whitney did (not without difficulty, since it was spring) was to find a specimen of this plant lying somewhere in the barn, which he had never seen before in his life. Legend has it that Whitney had an epiphany when he saw a cat. She tried to grab the chicken with her claws, but since the prey was walking behind a wire fence, the predator only got a tuft of chicken fluff. Another legend gives the main role in the invention of the cotton gin not to a cat, but to a woman. According to this version, Catherine Greene not only brought the problem to Whitney's attention, but also made a major improvement to Whitney's model. When he came to her with a prototype of the future cotton gin, it was a rotating drum with wooden teeth that separated the valuable cotton fluff from the seeds. The cleaned fluff could then be combed from the drum. The problem was that the wooden teeth did not grip the fibers well, leaving a lot of waste. Katherine Green took her wire hair brush out of her drawer and showed it to Whitney. He beamed: “I understood your hint. Now everything should work out.”
Indeed, the results were impressive. With the new device, a worker could manually harvest 50 pounds of ginned cotton in a day—25 times more than before. It was necessary to quickly secure a patent, and Whitney went to the then capital of the United States, Philadelphia, where he paid a patent fee of $30, and on June 20, 1793, filed a patent application with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. After an exchange of letters between the Secretary of State and the inventor and the presentation of a working industrial model, on March 14, 1794, Whitney received a patent signed by Jefferson.
Under patent law at the time, the patent holder had exclusive rights to his invention for 14 years. If you want, make new cars yourself and sell them to everyone in need, or if you want, sell the license to someone else for a lot of money. But it was not there. The invention was so simple and effective that all farmers in the South began to produce their own cotton gins, claiming that they, if not invented them themselves, then at least significantly improved them. The strategy of Miller, who provided the initial capital to Whitney and was responsible for marketing in their partnership, also did not contribute to financial success: Miller decided to produce as many machines as possible, place them on plantations and charge the planters a fee for using the new product in the amount of 40% of the harvest. The planters rebelled: why on earth should they give up their cotton for some kind of roller with teeth that any mechanic can make?
The end result was that the patent for the cotton gin not only failed to enrich Whitney, but also forced him into a mountain of debt to litigate and maintain production. Whitney’s other most important invention, the mass production of weapons and spare parts for them, did not bring any income either. It is not known whether Whitney was the pioneer of the idea of ​​​​unifying production (so that a broken part did not need to be made specifically for this broken gun, but could take any one mass-produced for this model), but the spread of mass production is undoubtedly Whitney's merit. By the end of his life, Ellie Whitney was quite a wealthy man, but only because he managed to successfully invest his money in stocks.
As for invention, Whitney's activities had literally historical consequences, and not only for technology. Thanks to the cotton gin, labor productivity on plantations increased and slavery in the South became economically profitable. And thanks to the methods of mass production introduced by Whitney, the industry of the North began to rapidly develop. So Whitney, in a sense, had a hand in both the fact that the southern states defended slavery in the Civil War, and the fact that the northerners won this war.

Lincoln, ear protectors and Christmas stocking
“Everything that can be invented has already been invented!” - exclaimed the head of the American patent office, Charles Deuel, in 1899, trying to convince Congress and the president of the need to abolish his own office.
The chief patent officer's feelings are understandable. The list of inventions patented in the 19th century leaves just such an impression - everything has already been invented. Humanity acquired the telegraph, telephone, phonograph, electric light bulb... The patent fever affected everyone - even people who seemed very far from technology: women, children, politicians, writers. In 1809, the first patent was issued to a woman - Mary Keys patented a method of making straw products using threads. In 1849, the future president and then congressman, Abraham Lincoln, distinguished himself by becoming the owner of a patent for a “device for moving ships by swimming across shallows.” In 1871, a patent was issued to Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain) for “an improved form of adjustable detachable clothing strings” (this, by the way, was not his only patent). In 1873, 15-year-old Chester Greenwood invented and patented fur earmuffs that protected him from the cold and wind while skating and later in the trenches of the First World War, thanks to which the owner of Greenwood's ear protector factory became fabulously rich.
Despite the pessimistic predictions of Charles Hughes, the flow of inventions did not dry out in the 20th century. Among the applications that thousands of patent office employees have to study, there are many fantastic ones. Patent law enthusiasts want to patent, for example, "a device for a child's Christmas stocking that provides a visually perceptible light signal at the time of Santa Claus's arrival by igniting an externally visible light source coupled to an energy source located inside said stocking."
An equally serious problem is solved by a complex system of devices, sensors and signals that allows for “non-lethal cockfighting” like fencing matches: “Signals are generated and transmitted to a remote center using transmitters operated by switches and attached to the skin in the bottom area below tail plumage of each of the opposing birds." Against the backdrop of such applications, one cannot help but be moved by the desire to patent a special glove for lovers with two sets of fingers and a common central part - so that lovers can walk in gloves, holding hands and at the same time feeling each other’s palms.
One of the most notorious patents of recent years was awarded to Steven Olsen, who invented “a new and improved method of swinging on a swing,” which involves pulling “first on one chain and then on the other.” The application emphasizes that thanks to this invention, “even the youngest users will be able to swing independently and enjoyably, which will greatly benefit all members of society.” This seemingly unremarkable patent, issued to a seven-year-old boy, dealt a serious blow to the reputation of the patent office. The fact is that the application on behalf of Stephen was drawn up and submitted by 3M patent specialist Peter Olsen in order to clearly explain to his son what he actually does at work. But patent officials are no longer laughing. In order for a patent issued due to oversight to become invalid, they will have to find documentary evidence of the lack of novelty in it. In other words, you will have to prove that from time immemorial children have swung on swings this way - pulling “first on one chain, and then on the other.”
Children's patents are not always the result of a parental joke. Kay-Kay Gregory followed in the footsteps of Chester Greenwood and came up with another piece of winter equipment. “Wrists” that protect the sleeves from snow getting into them bring the patent holder a good income. And the youngest patent holder was Sydney Dittman, who at two years old assembled a device for opening drawers and doors from scrap parts from her toys, and at four years old, through the efforts of her father, received a patent for it as a device useful for people with disabilities. Another inventor, schoolgirl Kellyann, apparently suffered so much from her screaming classmates that she came up with the “sh-sh-sh-machine.” This device measures the noise level in the classroom and gives a signal when the children's hubbub begins to go off scale.

Body armor and other women's secrets
It is not only delusions of grandeur, mental disorders and childish curiosity that drive those who dream of becoming a patent holder. Sensible women also do not miss the opportunity to legitimize their rights to various useful devices. An inspiring example comes from divorced single mother and bad secretary Beth Graham, who made so many typing mistakes and was so desperate to keep her job that she came up with a recipe for “liquid paper” to correct typos. Beginning with a makeshift mixing of white paint, thinner and other ingredients in her own kitchen, Beth ended up a millionaire by selling her putty corporation for $47.5 million.
It's no surprise that the secretary's salvation was invented by a secretary. It is also not surprising that it was a woman who came up with the idea of ​​replacing uncomfortable rigid corsets with elegant bras. However, there are at least two women's discoveries that were primarily useful to men. Chemist Stephanie Kwolek created Kevlar, a material used in body armor. And the Hollywood star of the 40s, Hedy Lamarr, revolutionized modern communication systems by coming up with the idea of ​​transmitting signals with frequency hopping. This principle is used in all modern broadband wireless communication systems.
Hedy's dramatic fate serves as the best confirmation of the foresight of the holder of three patents, Mark Twain, who wrote: “I recently became aware of an invention that is guaranteed to bring millions to those who invest in it. I hastened to forward this information to the man whom I hate and whose family I dream of. ruin." Together with her friend, an avant-garde piano player, Hedy Lamarr invented "frequency hopping" and patented it in 1942. Unfortunately, this was a case where the invention was too ahead of its time. The military began actively using the FHS (frequency hopping) system only in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, to encrypt messages transmitted between ships. By that time, the patent had already expired. Until the 1980s, SCH was classified and used only by the military, but in 1985, access to it was opened to commercial organizations. Communications companies received huge opportunities and huge profits, but this no longer had anything to do with Hedy Lamarr. She lived for 86 years, was in great need, and was even caught twice for petty theft, but she never even received gratitude from those who took advantage of her invention.

Device, appearance, word
With the development of software, the Internet and new technologies in general, the boundaries of applicability of patent law are increasingly blurred. At the dawn of the patent era, everything was clear: patents were given for something

completely material, equipped, as a rule, with a working model (now it needs to be presented only for one invention - a perpetual motion machine). Then it became possible to patent the appearance of products invented by the inventor - this is how design patents appeared. In addition, phrases may be the subject of patenting. We are not talking about copyrights to a literary work, but about maxims like “After all, I deserve it!”, which are registered with the patent office as trademarks. People don't even realize how often they speak in other people's words - especially in English. Wishes "Have a nice day!" is the property of a cosmetics company, and the question "How do you feel?" a software company has staked its claim. The McDonald's company alone owns more than 130 branded phrases - from the Napoleonic "Changing the face of the planet" to the jingoistic "When America wins, you win," as well as the mysterious "Hey, it could happen!"
The most recent expansion of the scope of patent law has occurred in the last 10-15 years. It has become possible to patent completely ephemeral entities - business and computer technologies. One of the most famous examples is Amazon.com's patented one-click ordering technology. As a result, customers of all other e-commerce companies are forced to double-click to avoid violating Amazon's patent rights.

Roses, bacteria, mice
The basic idea of ​​patent law has always been that everything existing under the sun and created by man can be patented. The first exception was made in 1930 - for plants. Congress, however, was aware that it was stepping on a slippery slope. But the desire to reward breeders for their work prevailed, and the law on plant patenting was adopted. In 1970, congressmen, apparently sensing the approaching era of biotechnology, decided to close all the loopholes just in case and adopted a special amendment prohibiting the patenting of bacteria.
Just two years later, General Electric (GE) filed an application to patent the bacteria as if nothing had happened. When the application was rejected on apparent legal grounds, GE sued. Whatever the law said, for her, a new bacterium grown in a laboratory was no worse than some frost-resistant breeding rose. Even much more useful: the invented bacterium was able to eat oil stains on the surface of salt water, thus cleaning up oil spill areas. In 1980, the court ruled in favor of the company: "The fact that bacteria are living organisms is of no legal significance." GE achieved its goal - the boundary between living and non-living things in patent law disappeared.
The next step came in 1988, when Harvard University received a patent for the mouse. No, of course, the mouse was not a simple one, but an exclusive laboratory cancer mouse, and it was born to get cancer and thereby benefit people. Frightened by the outcome of the case against GE, the patent office employees, as it turned out later, patented not just a certain type of mouse with overexpression of a certain oncogene, but generally unknown something: the wording of the patent gave its owner the right to any non-human mammal with any intensely working oncogene. After much debate, the state managed to persuade the DuPont company, which bought the license for onkomice, to allow the use of animals covered by its patent for scientific purposes. But this permission does not apply to private companies.

Patent against the centaur
At the turn of the 21st century, genes became the most fashionable subject of patenting. No one is bothered anymore by the fact that genes do not meet any of the good old criteria for issuing a patent. Genes are not new, they are not created by humans, and their functions are mostly unknown or poorly known—both public and private companies are rushing to patent hundreds of pieces of DNA in the hope of later discovering something valuable there. Many seriously fear that instead of adding “fuel to the fire of genius,” such patents only create obstacles for doctors and scientists. It turns out that a person suffering from Alzheimer's disease carries a gene that belongs to one of the universities, and women with suspected breast cancer are partly the property of Myriad Genetics, from which they must buy tests for the presence of two specific genes in their bodies.
"We have abolished slavery. Now a human being as a whole cannot be someone's property - but you can have all its component parts separately. Genes, cells, chromosomes, organs, tissues... What if we patented all the building blocks of life? Which Will we leave the role to faith and religion, or at least to the idea of ​​nature as independent of us and primary in relation to us? - this is the reasoning of Jeremy Rifkin, who published a book back in 1977 that predicted the commercialization of the genome. But even this man now fights the enemy with his own weapons. Since 1997, he has been seeking a patent for any organisms with a mixed - human-animal - set of genes. That is, he wants to patent modern centaurs, minotaurs, mermaids, sphinxes and other hybrids, in the genome of which there is something from a person and something from an animal. And if he has such a patent, he will be able to stop science and protect life from the attack of patents. At least he hopes so.
ANASTASIA FROLOVA

Samuel Clemens, known throughout the world as the writer and journalist Mark Twain, was also a talented inventor. He invented and patented, for example, the technique of scrapbooking, which is very popular in our time. His love for ladies was also manifested in the invention of an elastic strap, which allows you to fasten your bra so that it does not hinder your movements. In addition to women's underwear, this strap was used in vests, trousers and other fashionable clothing of the time. Twain spoke very succinctly about his invention: “The advantages of the elastic strap are so obvious that they do not require explanation at all.”

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