Mr. Clemens’s experience with his copperⒶtextual note stock as advised by Mr. Rogers; his determination to exploit his stocks and bonds according to his own intuitions—Pecuniarily the last twelvemonth would have been more profitable than 1902 if he had acted on his own inspirations—Mr. Clemens buys a hundredⒶtextual note shares of wireless telephoneⒶtextual note stock.
I wish to go on for a while cataloguing the things which have happened to me recently, for I find it very interesting to note how important each of them was in its turn, and how quickly it dropped to the rear and became of no consequence. I note one circumstance with high gratification, and that is this: that whereas Mr. Rogers’s fiscal knowledge is better than mine, my fiscal ignorance is better than his fiscal knowledge, every now and then, and that whereas his caution is better than mine, my destitution of it is worth six of it. For instance: a year and a half ago, when he told me to buy that copper stock which I have been talking aboutⒺexplanatory note, and said that the price would be certain to advance, I wanted to take two thousand shares, which would cost eighty-six thousand dollars, and would come near to exhausting my bank-balance. He said no, take the half of it. To my mind this was not good reasoning. If the price was sure to advance, why shouldn’t one buy all of that stock that he could pay for? However, I respected his judgment, and I took a thousand shares instead of two thousand. I took it at 43; 50 was par. It was a 6 per centⒶtextual note stock and would soon pay 8Ⓐtextual note. Copper was more precious than gold, and not all the mines in the world could supply the demand. I kept the thousand shares nine months; I collected one 8 per centⒶtextual note dividend and one 10 per centⒶtextual note dividend; then the market price had climbed to 79. I thought I would sell out. Thirty-two thousand dollars’Ⓐtextual note profit on an investment of forty-three thousand, all in nine months, with four or five thousand in dividends added, seemed to me good enough for so humble a financier as I; but no, Mr. Rogers said, “Sell half; youⒶtextual note couldn’t possibly have anything better than that stock. Sell half, keep the rest.”Ⓐtextual note I obeyed. By luck, I had bought at the lowest figure; by luck again I sold at the highest figure—79 ¾. As soon as I withdrew my support from that excellent stock it began to drop along down, a point at a time, until two or three months ago, when it seemed to have reached the low water mark at 58. I consultedⒶtextual note Mr. Rogers, and he said yes, buy. I thought of taking the whole mine, but again he was conservative; again he was cautious. He said, “takeⒶtextual note what you can pay for and no more, and leave as much money in the bank as you take out of it.”Ⓐtextual note So I took a thousand shares at 58. I still had five hundred at 43, and so the average cost of the whole was 53. I made up my mind to sell those fifteen hundred shares sure if the price ever reached 79 again. It did reach that figure, but, as I have already explained in an earlier chapter,Ⓐtextual note I was asleep at the time and failed to secure the forty thousand dollars due me on my judgment. As I have said, the stock began to soar along down until it struck bottom day before yesterday, when I [begin page 16] boughtⒶtextual note two hundred and fifty shares at 53, and of course by this maneuver I sent it up. It went up because I wanted to buy another two hundred and fifty, but I was proposing to pay less for it. Yesterday afternoon it had gone up five points and a half. I seem to be one of the most formidable persons in the financiering business, for I can’t sell without sending the stock down, and I can’t buy without sending it up. By my count, my pocket is much damaged through Mr. Rogers’s expert judgment. I estimate that if I had bought and sold every time that I proposed to buy and sell, I should now have a profit of ninety thousand dollars in the bank, whereas, my intentions being defeated by Mr. Rogers’s superior judgment, that money failed to arrive at the bank—and yet I do not see but that I get as much satisfaction out of it as anybody could get out of ninety thousand dollars that he didn’t own, for I have already in fancy spent it several times, and have gotten very real pleasure out of spending it; also I allow myself luxuries which I could not afford at all if I didn’t have that imaginary ninety thousand to draw upon. I am so pleased with my financial superiorities over Mr. Rogers’s that I am resolved to exploit them now and see what will come of it. Within a week this temporary panic will be over, and the sound and safe dividend-paying stocks will be up again; then I shall sell my hoard, both stocks and bonds, that I have been holding these six or seven years; and I mean to put the money in the bank and leave it there at 3 per centⒶtextual note until the next flurry comes, even if it be six months that I must wait. Many a time, in these six or seven years, each stock that I own has gone up ten or twenty points above what I paid for it, and later each of them has gone ten points or more below what I paid for it. HereafterⒶtextual note I mean to sell them out at normal rates, then buy them back and sell them again, and keep this game going. I cannot hurt myself, because if they get left on my hands some time or other, no harm will be done, because their dividends will continue, and not fail. Pecuniarily, this last twelvemonth would have been more profitable to me than was the year 1902, if I had acted upon my fine inspirations and let Mr. Rogers’s educated judgment alone, for the royalties on my old books have paid me forty thousand dollars, which is about eight thousand more than they have been in the annualⒶtextual note habit of paying; also the North American Review is paying me thirty thousand for a hundred thousand words of my Autobiography; indeed I should have beaten 1902 considerably but for the miscarriage of that ninety thousand dollars.
There is a new invention. Apparently it is a wireless telephone. Everybody can have the machine in his house, and it has one or two advantages over the telephone that uses a wire. For instance: it records the messages which it receivesⒺexplanatory note, and it is able to do this when no one is present; therefore you can call up a friend, deliver your message into his house with none to receive it but the machine; when he returns home he can reverse the spool and listen to the message; also it keeps its secrets; they do not pass through a central station to be listened to by the telephone girl and distributed abroad. Some of the Company’s circulars and other advertisements reached me yesterday by mail. I found that I could get a hundred shares of the stock at ten dollarsⒺexplanatory note a share, if I wanted it, but that I was not privileged to take any more than that. That has a suspicious look; it looks like fishing for widows and orphans, and the clergy. You can float any speculation that [begin page 17] is inventable if you offer its stock at ten dollars a share, with a prediction that it will later sell for a million; then you get all the widows and orphans and clergymen that are floating around. They will pledge their very children and their Bibles to raise money enough to buy. However, I am no better, myself, than a widow, or an orphan, or a clergyman, when it comes to a chance for a clear, straight, unmitigated and inexcusable gamble; I always want to take a hand in that. Instantly I wanted a hundred of those shares; then I thought, no, I should have to conceal the matter from Mr. Rogers; then, later, I could not keep my secret; I should be sure to reveal it to him, and then there would be sarcasms. However, at this point in my reflections I picked up one of the advertisements which had thitherto escaped me. It was a facsimiled letter from a man of high fame in science, and of acknowledged and unassailable probity. In this letter he asked for a hundred shares, and said that he wanted to use them in rectification of a mistake which he made twenty-eight years ago when twenty-five hundred shares of Bell Telephone stock were offered to him for five hundred dollars and he didn’t take them. Dear me, I knew how that poor wise ass was feeling! His wail brought back to me my own experience of twenty-nine years ago with Bell Telephone stock—an experience which I have already recorded, with many pangs, in one of the early chapters of this AutobiographyⒺexplanatory note. He remarked in his letter that if he had taken the twenty-five hundred shares it would have paid him twenty million dollars before this. It hurt me to the marrow to hear this man go into these quite unnecessary particulars, for it called back to my memory, out of that distant past, how in 1877 or ’78 I had twenty-three thousand dollars in my pocket which I had no particular use for, and the Bell Telephone people tried to trade me a couple of tons of stock for it. I was fully as wise as this other smarty, and they did not succeed; but if they had succeeded I would pay off our national debt now, and let the country take a fresh start.
Upon reflection, I sent a thousand dollars this morning and captured a hundred shares of this gambleⒺexplanatory note. I was not going to be caught out again. I shall not liveⒶtextual note to pay the national debt, but in my dying moments I shall instruct Clara and Jean to attend to it.
he told me to buy that copper stock which I have been talking about] Henry Huttleston Rogers, a vice-president of Standard Oil and a highly successful expert on the stock market, had advised Clemens to buy stock in the Utah Consolidated Mining Company, whose president was Rogers’s son-in-law, Urban H. Broughton. As of April 1906, Rogers himself owned 5,025 shares (for Rogers see AutoMT1 , 192–94, 522 n. 192.15–17; for Broughton see AD, 18 May 1907, note at 51.37–38). The company, a consolidation of several smaller companies, had been established in 1903; in addition to copper ore it mined gold and silver. The rate of production peaked in 1906, and then fell in 1907, when its net earnings declined by more than half. When Clemens died in 1910 his 1,750 shares (worth about $81,000) were by far his largest investment after the $200,000 that he owned in “capital stock of the Mark Twain Company” (“Utah Consolidated. President Broughton Says a Good Dividend Can Be Maintained in Spite of Copper Prices,” Wall Street Journal, 20 Apr 1906, 5; Stevens 1908, 1374–77; 14 Feb 1910 to Paine, WU-MU; “Estate of Samuel L. Clemens” 1910; for the Mark Twain Company see AD, 25 Mar 1909, note at 304.16).
wireless telephone . . . records the messages which it receives] Clemens refers to the Telegraphone, invented in 1898 by Valdemar Poulsen (1869–1942) of Denmark. It was not itself a telephone, but rather a device that could be attached to a telephone to record messages; it could also be used for dictation (see also the note at 16.38–39). Clemens’s confusion is understandable. In late 1906 and early 1907 the newspapers printed numerous articles about the invention and development of wireless transmission of the voice. The technology, however, was still impractical for widespread use because of its limited range. In 1903 Poulsen had patented an arc-transmitter that could increase the range, and he licensed the rights to several companies that made premature claims of commercial success to attract investors. Within about ten years the arc-transmitter was made obsolete by vacuum-tube technology (“American Telegraphone Company Introduces Wonderful Invention,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 Mar 1907, 32; “May Telephone Across Ocean,” Los Angeles Times, 4 Feb 1907, 14; Thomas H. White 2012).
I found that I could get a hundred shares of the stock at ten dollars] The Sterling Debenture Corporation of New York sent a promotional letter to Clemens on 19 January 1907, offering stock in the American Telegraphone Company (CU-MARK):
The first issue of the company’s stock is now being sold for the purpose of equipping a factory in Wheeling, W. Va., to enable the company to manufacture all its machines in this country instead of importing them from Denmark, the home of the invention.
These shares are $10 each, and you may subscribe for one or ten or fifty up to one hundred, but no one person will be allowed to take more than one hundred shares. . . .
As soon as the Telegraphones can be manufactured in quantities to supply the orders that are already on file, the value of these shares will advance as rapidly as did that of the Bell Telephone shares under like conditions.
my own experience of twenty-nine years ago with Bell Telephone stock . . . early chapters of this Autobiography] Wireless companies typically marketed their stock by citing the example of the highly profitable Bell Telephone Company. The United Wireless Telegraph Company, for example, claimed that “inasmuch as the Wireless is destined to supplant the telegraph, telephone and cable, its shares should prove even more profitable than those of the Bell Telephone, wherein an original investment of $100 represents a value to-day of $200,000” (“United Wireless Telegraph Company,” New York Tribune, 17 Mar 1907, 7). For Clemens’s account of his failure to invest in the telephone in 1878 see the Autobiographical Dictation of 24 May 1906 ( AutoMT2 , 56–57, 491–92 nn. 56.37–57.8, 57.15–18).
I sent a thousand dollars this morning and captured a hundred shares of this gamble] Clemens actually paid a $20 deposit and received a temporary stock certificate dated 28 March 1907, for a hundred “shares of capital stock of the American Telegraphone Company, fully paid and non-assessable (at $10 per share)”; a permanent certificate was to be “promptly forwarded upon receipt of the amount, $980” (CU-MARK). The Sterling Debenture Company succeeded in selling 100,000 shares of this stock at $10 a share, but kept $800,000 in commissions and paid only $200,000 to the Telegraphone Company. Between 1906 and its forced closure in December 1912, this brokerage firm sold large quantities of stock in legitimate companies at inflated prices, and further cheated buyers by aggressively marketing worthless securities. In April 1914 its officials were convicted of mail fraud and received sentences ranging from three to six years in prison (Dater 1913; “Sterling Debenture Co. Sentences,” Wall Street Journal, 8 Apr 1914, 8). Fraud was in fact so widespread throughout the wireless industry that in early 1907 journalist Frank Fayant published a series of articles exposing the “financial jugglery” of companies engaging in what he called the “wireless telegraph bubble,” describing its “chief figure,” Abraham White of the United Wireless Telegraph Company, as “a modern Colonel Sellers” (Fayant 1907a, 1907b).
Source document.
TS1 Typescript carbon (the ribbon copy is lost), leaves numbered 1916–23, made from Hobby’s notes and revised.The ribbon copy being lost, TS1 (a carbon copy), as revised by Clemens, is the only authoritative source for this dictation.