Mark Twain, surely the most American of great American writers, was, like the country itself, a creature of stupendous contradictions—gentle and tender at any given moment, and in the next possessed of rages so intense they could rattle the bones and shrivel the mind of anyone at whom they were directed; almost hysterically prudish when his wife and daughters were concerned, yet driven time and again to exercises (though not for publication) that were both prurient and scatalogical; contemptuous of money and headlong in pursuit of it; scornful of gentility and through much of his life terrified that he did not possess it.

These and other paradoxes colored his work and infected his life, but perhaps none more thoroughly defined Twain than the infatuation this man of literature displayed for the machine civilization that was the very antithesis of art. FIe loved technology and all its gadgets, and for those responsible he reserved a special admiration. “An inventor,” he once wrote, “is a poet—a true poet—and nothing in any degree less than a high order of poet.” In A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court (1889) he has his protagonist declare: “I knew that a country without a patent office was just a crab and couldn’t travel any way but sideways or backways.” And since he was a man true to his convictions—whatever they happened to be at any given moment—it should not be surprising to learn that Twain himself entered the murky world of patent poesy. He did so three times, and once with a modest success that only encouraged him in a course that would nearly wreck his life.

Twain’s first attempt to startle the world with his inventive genius came on September 1,1871, when he applied to the U.S. Patent Office for a patent on something he described as “an adjustable and detachable strap for vests, pantaloons or other garments requiring straps.” Unfortunately, before his application could be approved, another inventor came along with the same idea, and the question of who came first had to be adjudicated. In a letter to the Patent Office substantiating his claim, Twain noted that “For four or five years I turned the idea of such a contrivance over in my mind at times, without a successful conclusion; but on the 13th of August last, as I lay in bed, I thought of it again, & then I said I would ease my mind and invent that strap before I got up—probably the only prophecy I ever made that was worth its face.” With the letter, Twain included some rough drawings which he claimed had been done on the spot (they are shown above): ”… these details seem a little trivial, I grant,” he apologized, “but they are history & therefore in some degree respect-worthy.…” Perhaps on the grounds of superior literary style, the Patent Office decided in his favor and he was issued Patent No. 121,992.