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I was surprised to see this striking picture of Mark Twain connecting two long wires and creating an intense ball of light, casting him in an otherworldly glow. What a picture huh?
The caption under the picture read ‘Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s lab’ and indicated that the man watching in the background was Nikola Tesla himself.
But what was Mark Twain doing in Nikola Tesla’s lab anyway? It turns out that these two were great friends and saw each other as often as they could.
Tesla had first become aware of Twain during his younger years while crippled with sicknesses so bad that the doctors had given up all hope. He was bedridden and sinking into deep despair when someone gave him a couple of Twain’s books to read to pass the time.
Tesla said that the books were so captivating and moving that it helped pull him out of the depressed state he was in, setting the stage for him to recover.
Later on in life he met Mark Twain at a place they both liked to go called The Player’s Club, Twain was someone absolutely entranced by things like science, technology, and inventions and so naturally he connected with Tesla right off the bat. It was there at that club that they began a strong friendship that would last the rest of their lives.
In many ways the two lived in the world of imagination, just different aspects of it. Both could pull ideas out of thin air and make monumental changes to the world around them, one through words and the other through electricity. They admired this ability in each other and like to hang out and talk for hours in Tesla’s lab.
So really this isn’t only an awesome picture of Mark Twain like I’d originally thought, but also a snapshot of a moment in time between two very good friends. Epic friends. And if pictures could talk I be this one would have a lot of epic things to say.
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I didn’t know or recall they were friends. I wonder if Twain invested in Teslas’s inventions? I know Twain lost fortunes on backing people.
Only recently have I become aware of Twains amazing and subversive insight into god, religion and politics.
Truly a Da Vinci kind of man.
Hi Terry,
While looking up stuff for this post I was pretty surprised not to run into anything saying that Mark Twain invested in even one of Nikola Tesla’s projects. It seems crazy to me that he’d lose all of his and his wife’s fortune investing in the freaking Paige Compositor guy but not Nikola Tesla, wtf?
If anything it seems like Tesla may have been lending money to Twain at some point. Apparently at the end of Tesla’s life when he was in a delirious state he kept on bugging one of the people that worked for him to deliver a message to Twain, who had died some time earlier. Tesla was hallucinating that Twain had showed up saying that he was in dire financial straits and needed some money asap, I bet this hallucination was based on real events at some point in the past.