Wilbur Wright was born near Millville, Indiana, on April 16, 1867.
Wilbur Wright in 1905
He was the older of the two flight pioneering Wright Brothers and had four other siblings.
His father Rev Milton Wright, was an editor, clergyman and later a non-conformist Bishop.
Wilbur was named for Willbur Fisk a clergymen that Milton Wright admired. His neighbors knew him and Orville simply as "the Bishop's kids", or "the Bishop's boys".
Because of their father's position as a bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, he traveled often and Wilbur and his siblings frequently moved — twelve times before finally settling permanently in Dayton, Ohio in 1884.
Wilbur was an athletic child. He first developed his interest in aviation during three years of reclusiveness after being badly injured in an ice hockey game, when another player's stick hit him in the face. He lost his two front teeth in the accident.
The player who knocked his teeth out, Oliver Cook Haugh, grew up to become a notorious Midwest serial killer.
Wilbur in 1876
EARLY CAREER
Wilbur did not go to college; he started a newspaper instead with his brother Orville. After that, they started a shop where they built and repaired bicycles.
By the 1890s, the Wrights were interested in flight, especially the gliders of Otto Lilienthal. In 1896 they set about designing a kite big enough to carry a man and spent three summers testing and perfecting it.
By 1901 they testing gliders in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, where there were strong and steady winds. They also made over 200 small versions of the wings and built a wind tunnel for model airplanes to test how well different wing shapes would lift an aircraft. The data it generated was critical to their first powered flight two years later.
Wilbur just after landing the 1901 glider
FLIGHTS
After the success of their gliders, the brothers decided to build a flying machine with an engine in their bicycle shop. No manufacturer would provide them with an engine, so they had to build their own.
Orville and Wilbur Wright designed and built the first controlled, powered, heavier-than-air airplane in Dayton, Ohio. The brothers took to the air for the first time making two flights each from level ground into a freezing headwind gusting to 27 miles per hour (43 km/h) at a North Carolina beach on December 17, 1903.
Two years later Wilbur Wright piloted Wright Flyer III in a flight of 24 miles in 39 minutes, a world record that stood until 1908.
Wright Flyer III
On May 22, 1906, the Wright brothers were granted a patent for their "Flying-Machine”.
The local newspaper editor decided not to cover their historic first manned flight in 1903. It took five years for the American public and newspaper reports to catch on, even ignoring reports in Europe where Wilbur had been demonstrating his flights and they were well known.
The Wright Brothers brought great attention to flying by Wilbur's flight around the Statue of Liberty in New York in 1909.
In 1909, the Wrights won the first US military aviation contract when they built a machine that met the requirements of a two-seater, capable of flights of an hour's duration, at an average of 40 miles per hour (64 km/h) and land undamaged. $30,000 of the federal budget was reserved for military aviation. That year the Wrights were also building Wright Flyers in factories in Dayton and in Germany.
The Wright Brothers had a college-educated sister, Katherine, who kept their affairs in order so they could focus on making the first plane. Katherine later became an international celebrity when she accompanied her famous brothers in Europe.
The Wright brothers formed the Curtiss-Wright Corporation with Glenn Curtiss for the commercial manufacture of their airplanes on November 24, 1909.
The Wright Brothers only flew together on the same flight one time, a six-minute flight on May 25, 1910 near Dayton. They'd promised their father, Milton, they would never fly together to avoid the chance of a double tragedy and to ensure one brother would remain to continue their flight experiments.
PERSONAL LIFE
The Reverend Milton Wright preached a sermon as an Evangelical United Brethren Bishop in which he said, "If God wanted to fly he would have given us wings". Three months after preaching his sermon, his sons, Orville and Wilbur Wright built and flew their first self-propelled plane. The brothers were nominal Protestant; they didn't attend church, but refused to work on Sundays.
Wilbur Wright was a baggy trousered thinker. He loved reading and writing and contributed stories to his clergyman father's magazineReligious Telescope.
Neither Wilbur nor his brother Orville ever married. They lived together and even shared a bank account.
LAST YEARS AND DEATH
In 1912 Wilbur Wright fell ill after eating a dish of Boston seafood during a business trip. His brother Orville, who ate the same meal, also fell sick and barely survived. After returning to Dayton in early May 1912 Wilbur fell sick again and was diagnosed with typhoid fever. He died, at age 45, at the Wright family home on May 30, 1912.
Orville Wright was born in Dayton, Ohio, on August 19, 1871.
Orville Wright
He had five other siblings including his older brother Wilbur.
His father the Rev Milton Wright, was an editor, clergyman later a non-conformist Bishop. He once preached a sermon saying, "If God wanted to fly he would have given us wings". Three months later his sons Orville and Wilbur had made their first powered flight.
He was named for Orville Dewey, a clergymen that Milton Wright admired.
Orville's father once gave him a toyhelicopter invented by Alphonse Penaud.
Orville and his brother Wilbur demonstrated their mechanical abilities at an early age. As young boys they were fascinated with flight playing with kites and their toy helicopter.
One of his friends and classmates in high school was future poet and writer Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Orville Wright was expelled from elementary school during his sixth grade for mischievous behaviour.
Young Orville
EARLY CAREER
After reconditioning an old printing press Orville and his brother Wilbur started a newspaperWest Side News. In April 1890 they converted the paper to a daily, The Evening Item, but it lasted only four months. They then focused on commercial printing.
Orville Wright and his brother Wilbur opened a bicycle repair shop in 1892. Soon they were manufacturing their own cycles. (The Wright Cycle Exchange, later the Wright Cycle Company)
Supported by the income from their bicycle shop, they started developing their motor driven flying machine.
Wright Brothers bicycle By 350z33 at English Wikipedia,
In 1901, the Wright brothers built their own wind tunnel out of wood, old hacksaw blades and bicycle spokes; they used it to test more than 200 wing shapes hand made from pieces of sheet steel and wax. The data it generated was critical to their first powered flight two years later.
FLIGHTS
Orville Wright along with his brother, Wilbur Wright flew the first successful, albeit brief, "flying machine" in 1903.
The brothers were inspired by the way buzzards spread their wings to design their flying machines. They realised that the bird retained balance in the air by twisting the tip of its wings so they created a wing warping method based on this observation.
The Wright brothers didn't like to fly together in fear of both of them dying in an accident. They wanted at least one of them to survive to carry on research. They drew lots to see who would make the first powered flight and Orville won.
Orville Wright's first flight in his Wright Flyer One at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina was on December 17, 1903. It flew for 12 seconds at a height of 500 feet and covered 37,120 feet. The flight was witnessed by four men and a boy.
First flight of the Wright Flyer, December 17, 1903, Orville piloting, Wilbur running at wingtip.
The Wright Flyer One was a biplane glider fitted with a 12 hp motor and linen covered wings. It did not have an undercarriage and carried only one person lying prone. The glider was based on the design of a bicycle with wings and engine. It launched off wooden rails.
After four flights by the Wright Brothers a gust of wind overturned and wrecked their wooden flier. However they stuffed all the pieces into barrels and shipped them back home to their bicycle shop. The original machine is now in The Science Museum, London.
Orville Wright did not actually sit in the Wright Flyer during its first flight. Instead, he lay flat on the lower wing in the middle of the airplane.
In 1905 the Wright Brothers built their Flyer 111. It was the first practical plane capable of flights over half an hour and could do a figure of eight.
On May 22, 1906, the Wright brothers were granted a patent for their "Flying-Machine".
The brothers first became famous in 1908 and 1909 when, weary of continuing doubt about their claims for a powered, heavier-than-air flying machine, they took their aeroplane on tour.
The world's first mortality in an airplane crash was on September 17, 1908 when Orville Wright's US War Department test plane crashed to the ground at Fort Myer on 17/9/1908. Orville's passenger, Lieut. Selfridge was killed and Orville had a broken leg, hip and ribs. The flying machine innovator laid for many days in a delirium and his recovery was delayed by his intense grief for "poor Selfridge".
Fort Myer crash. Photo by C.H. Claudy.
When offered a plane for military use, the American army was so sceptical of the brothers' claims that they refused to see a flight demonstration for five years. It took the world's first flying accident in 1908 for the Wrights to become front page news in the USA rather than flights of fancy and the army and manufacturers to catch the vision. Finally in 1909 they received an order from the American army for the first military aircraft.
Orville Wright and his English friend Alec Ogilvie remained in the air nine minutes and 45 seconds in a Wright Glider, at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina on October 24, 1911. This broke the Wright brothers' previous flight record for a glider of 1 minute 12 seconds set in 1903 with their 1902 glider. The new record stood for ten years until broken in Germany.
The 1911 glider over the Kill Devil Hills. Library of Congress Wright Collection.
The Wright Brothers had a college-educated sister, Katherine, who kept their affairs in order so they could focus on making the first plane.
LATER CAREER
The Wright brothers formed a million-dollar corporation for the commercial manufacture of their airplanes on November 24, 1909.
Wilbur died from typhoid fever in 1912 after a bout of food poisoning, an event Orville never completely recovered from. Orville barely survived the dish of Boston seafood which had brought on the food poisoning.
After Wilbur died of typhoid in 1912 Orville devoted himself to research in his Dayton mansion and was rarely seen in public. He sold his interests in the airplane company in 1915.
The Wright brothers' status as inventors of the airplane was subject to counter-claims by various parties. After Wilbur's death, Orville spent a lot of time on the patent suits involved.
In May 1896, Smithsonian Institution Secretary Samuel Langley had successfully flown an unmanned steam-powered fixed-wing model aircraft. For years, Orville argued with officials of the Smithsonian Institute over whether the Wrights or Langley had built the first plane. In 1942 the Smithsonian officials made a public apology to Orville.
Howard Hughes gave Orville Wright his last flight on a Lockheed Constellation. Orville said the wingspan on the Constellation was longer than their first flight.
PERSONAL LIFE
Both Orville and Wilbur hated making speeches. One day at a luncheon attended by a number of inventors, Wilbur was called on by the toastmaster "There must be some mistake" said Wilbur " Orville is the one who does the talking" The toastmaster turned to him. Orville stood up and announced "Wilbur just made the speech."
Wright brothers at the Belmont Park Aviation Meet in 1910 near New York
Orville Wright had an artistic bent and also played the mandolin.
Neither Orville nor his brother Wilbur ever married.
LAST YEARS AND DEATH
Orville Wright was still alive when the sound barrier was broken in 1947 by Chuck Yeager in his Bell X-1 airplane.
Orville Wright died from a heart attack while fixing the doorbell to his home in Oakwood, Ohio on January 30, 1948. Mahatma Gandhi died the same day.
Orville Wright, 1928
Orville Wright's home in Dayton has been preserved by the city. The airfield where they made experimental flights in Dayton is now part of the Wright-Patterson Airforce base.
Ohio has license plates reading "Birthplace of Aviation" and North Carolina reads "First in Flight" because the two states both claim the Wright Brothers as their own. The Wrights performed the first controlled, powered flight in Kitty Hawk, N.C. but built their plane in Ohio.
Neil Armstrong took the wood from the propeller of the Wright Brothers' first plane to the moon.
James Watt was born on January 19, 1736 in Greenock, Renfrewshire, Scotland.
James Watt by John Partridge, after Sir William Beechey (1806)
James was the eldest of the five surviving children of James Watt (1698–1782) and Agnes Muirhead (1703–1755).
James Watt Snr was a merchant and ballie who ran a successful ship and house building business.
Young James was a delicate child, who was bullied by his classmates.
It is said James originally got the idea for a steam engine while still a boy watching steam lift the lid off his mother’s teakettle.
James was educated at home by his mother, later going on to attend Greenock Grammar School.
Labelled dull and inept by his teachers James only began to develop intellectually when he got into geometry at the age of 13.
EARLY CAREER
After leaving school Watt worked in the workshops of his father's businesses. After his father lost his inheritance due to commercial disasters Watt left Greenock to seek employment in Glasgow as a mathematical instrument maker.
When he was 18 Watt's mother died and his father's health began to fail. He travelled to London and was apprenticed to John Morgan as an instrument maker for a year. He worked for long hours continuously in the cold workshop, during which his health declined.
In 1757 three professors offered Watt the opportunity to set up a small workshop Glasgow University. Watt was made responsible for the maintenance of the university's physics equipment. Two of the professors, the physicist and chemist Joseph Black who discovered carbon dioxide and the famed Adam Smith, became Watt's friends.
THE STEAM ENGINE
In 1763 a professor brought Watt's attention to a Newcomen steam engine that was not working properly. Whilst repairing it, Watt noticed the engine had a major weakness. However hard he concentrated he couldn't think it through. The Scottish engineer decided to take a peaceful, relaxed Sunday afternoon walk in Glasgow Green, one of Glasgow's many parks. When he'd reached the golf house an idea popped into his head, which led him to develop his improved steam engine.
James Eckford Lauder: James Watt and the Steam Engine: 1855
In 1768, Watt entered into a partnership with John Roebuck, the founder of Carron Iron Works near Falkirk. The following year Watt took out the famous patent for "A New Invented Method of Lessening the Consumption of Steam and Fuel in Fire Engines."
Iron workers in the 1760s were more like blacksmiths than modern machinists, and were unable to machine the piston and cylinder for Watt's steam engine with sufficient precision. Watt and Roebuck were as a consequence unable to make much money out of the Scottish engineer's invention. Watt was forced to take up employment—first as a surveyor, then as a civil engineer—for eight years. During this period he surveyed and planned the Coatbridge-Glasgow canal.
The partnership was a failure and Roebuck was forced to sell his share in Watt's engine to Birmingham manufacturer Matthew Boulton in return for cancellation of a £1,200 debt.
After the failure of partnership with Roebuck, Watt's partnership with Boulton was more successful. Boulton supplied the drive and business acumen Watt needed and soon his new steam engine replaced Newcomen’s. Their partnership lasted until Boulton's death in 1809.
Watt continued to experiment and in 1781 he produced a steam engine, which incorporated a series of radical improvements, notably the closing off of the upper part of the cylinder, thereby making the low-pressure steam drive the top of the piston instead of the atmosphere. Whereas his earlier machine, with its up-and-down pumping action, was ideal for draining mines, this new rotary-motion steam engine could be used to drive many different types of machinery including paper and flour mills and spinning and weaving machines.
Engraving of a 1784 steam engine designed by Boulton and Watt.
In 1788 Watt made a further improvement when he patented a throttle valve to control the power of the engine, and a centrifugal governor to keep it from "running away". These improvements taken together produced an engine which was up to five times as efficient in its use of fuel as the Newcomen engine.
It wasn't until 1790s it became apparent in how many varied situations steam could be used and by 1800 it had replaced water as the main source of power of engines.
Steam was the first form of energy not reliant on wind or man's strength.
The Watt steam engine is credited for driving the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The oldest working engine in the world is the Smethwick Engine, a Watt steam engine made by Boulton and Watt, which was brought into service in May 1779. It is now at Thinktank in Birmingham (formerly at Birmingham's Museum of Science and Industry).
Smethwick Engine - world's oldest engine still in working order. By IMechE1
LATER CAREER
In discussing animal power and particularly horse power, Watt estimated that a horse could do work equivalent to 33,000 ft⋅lbf/minone foot per minute. Because people used horses to pull carts in Watt's day, it was an amount of energy that could be understood by most people at that time and it was adopted as the standard power measurement by which engines are rated.
Boulton and Watt seized upon William Murdoch's invention of gaslighting. Their parliamentary lobbying resulted in gas street and domestic lighting.
Watt invented a mechanized method of copying manuscripts, the copying press. It became a commercial success and was widely used in offices even into the twentieth century.
By 1800 Watt had earned enough money to enable him to retire to his estate near Birmingham.
RELATIONSHIPS
In 1764, Watts married his cousin Margaret Miller, with whom he had five children, but only two of them Gregory and Janet, reached their teens. His wife died in childbirth in 1772.
In 1777, Watts got married for a second time to Ann Macgregor, daughter of a Glasgow dye-maker. She bore him two more children who both also died at young ages.
Though at times Watts could be gloomy and cantankerous, he was a much sought-after conversationalist and companion, always interested in expanding his horizons. His personal relationships with his friends and partners were always congenial and long-lasting.
BELIEFS
Watt was more interested in discussing scientific and philosophical questions than matters of religion. He belonged to the Lunar Society of Birmingham which met monthly to discuss scientific and philosophical questions. It was called thus because they would meet on the night of the full moon as the extra light made the journey home easier and safer in the absence of street lighting.
Other members of the group included Watt's business partner Matthew Boulton, the potter Joshua Wedgwood, the chemist Joseph Priestley and the freethinking poet, Erasmus Darwin. Venues included Erasmus Darwin's home in Lichfield and Matthew Boulton's residence, Soho House.
Watt was liberal in his political views.
PERSONAL LIFE
In 1790, Matthew Boulton recommended to Watt his friend, the architect Samuel Wyatt, who had designed Boulton's home, Soho House. Watt commissioned Wyatt to design Heathfield Hall in Handsworth, Staffordshire.
Watt's workroom at Heathfield, painted in 1889 by Jonathon Pratt
In his later years Watt purchased an estate in mid-Wales at Doldowlod House, one mile south of Llanwrthwl, which he much improved.
Watt heated his study with a steam pipe connected to a boiler, and Matthew Boulton installed steam heating in a friend's Birmingham house.
Watt was devoted to and skilled in music. He once built an organ.
HEALTH, LAST YEARS AND DEATH
A lifelong migraine sufferer, James Watt was a dreadful hypochondriac who was constantly complaining about every ailment under the sun.
Portrait of James Watt by Carl Frederik von Breda
After his retirement in 1800, Watt traveled to France and Germany with his second wife. He also revisited his hometown of Greenock in 1816.
James Watt passed peacefully away at Heathfield Hall on August 25, 1819 at the age of 83.
He was buried on September 2, 1819 in the graveyard of St Mary's Church, Handsworth.
Watt left over £60,000 (£81,000,000 in today's money) in his will to his family.
The metric unit of power, the Watt, is named after him despite Watt having nothing to do with electricity.
John Marshall Clemens died of pleurisy when Samuel was 12. He was returning from being sworn in as the newly elected clerk of the surrogate clerk in the frozen rain. Samuel's father left many debts.
Only three of Samuel's siblings survived childhood: Orion (1825–1897), Henry (1838–1858), and Pamela (1827–1904). His brother, Henry, was killed by an explosion on a Mississippisteamer.
After his father died Samuel was so full of remorse for his naughtiness during his father's lifetime that it worried his mother.
As a little brat, Samuel once sold the skin of a raccoon to a local shop owner. He was annoyed at only getting 10 cents for it, so when he noticed the man throw the skin into the back of a shop, he crept in through the back window and retrieved it. Sam repeated this many times until the shop owner realized what was going on.
At the age of 10, Samuel nearly died of measles during an epidemic.
Samuel regularly won the schoolspelling prize, his best skill at school.
He never graduated from state school. "I have never let schooling interfere with my education," he later quipped.
CAREER
Clemens was apprenticed to a local printer at the age of 12.
When Clemens' oldest brother, Orion, began publishing a newspaper the Hannibal Courier Samuel started contributing to it as a journeyman printer and occasional writer.
Some of the liveliest and most controversial stories in Orion's paper came from the pen of his younger brother--usually when Orion was out of town.
Samuel Clemens, age 15
Clemens left Hannibal at the age of 18 and worked as a printer in Cincinatti, St Louis, New York City and Philadelphia, joining the newly formed International Typographical Union.
Samuel was enchanted by life on River Mississippi as a child and steamboat pilot Horace E. Bixby took Twain on as a cub pilot to teach him the river between New Orleans and St. Louis for $500, payable out of Clemens' first wages after graduating.
He was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi until 1861 when the Civil War halted steamboat travel on the river. The profession, Clemens later claimed, would have held him to the end of his days, recounting his experiences in his bookLife on the Mississippi (1883).
Samuel Clemens enlisted in the Missouri militia in 1861 to fight in the war. However after two weeks he was invalided out suffering from fatigue.
In his short spell serving in the American Civil War, Clemens had a mule called Paintbrush.
Clemens escaped further contact with the war by going west in July of 1861 with his brother Orion who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada. The two traveled for two weeks across the Plains by stagecoach to the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada. Twain spent ten months silver mining in the Humboldt Mountains in the far west between 1861-62.
Clemens failed as a miner and walked 130 miles to Virginia City, Nevada, in order to successfully apply for a post working for the local newspaper there called the Territorial Enterprise.
Clemens first used his pen name in Nevada City on February 3, 1863, when he wrote a humorous travel account entitled "Letter From Carson – re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" and signed it "Mark Twain."
Twain spent two years as a reporter for the Virginia City Enterprise, in Nevada, before moving to San Francisco in 1864, still as a journalist.
Twain's first success as a writer came when his humorous tall tale "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was published in 1865 in the New York weekly The Saturday Press, bringing him national attention.
In the spring of 1866 Twain was commissioned by the Sacramento Union newspaper to travel to the Sandwich Islands (present day Hawaii) to write a series of letters reporting on his journey there.
The success of the letters and the personal encouragement of Colonel John McComb (publisher of San Francisco's Alta California newspaper) led Twain to try his hand at the lecture circuit. In 1866 he rented the Academy of Music charging a dollar a head admission. "Doors open at 7 o'clock," Twain wrote on the advertising poster. "The trouble to begin at 8 o'clock."
The first lecture was a wild success, and soon Twain was travelling up and down the California state, lecturing and entertaining packed houses.
In 1867 Twain formed with William Swinton the first ever newspaper syndicate, made up of 12 weekly journals.
Twain in 1867
After marrying Olivia Langdon in 1870, Twain took up position as one of the editor's and part owner of the Buffalo Express in New York.
Mark Twain patented under his real name Samuel Clemens an improvement in the "Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments" (ADSG) or "suspenders" in 1871.
More commercially successful was a self-pasting scrapbook he patented; a dried adhesive on the pages needed only to be moistened before use. "The only rational scrapbook the world has ever seen," Twain said. Over 25,000 were sold. However, in damp weather the pages stuck together and the company he put it in the hands of went under.
Twain also invented and patented bed clamps to prevent children from losing their bed clothes.
In 1891 he invented a three-piece board game called Mark Twain's Memory Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates. It was a commercial disaster.
Despite making a fortune as a writer, Twain was declared a bankrupt in 1894 after losing over half a million dollars during a succession of failures in backing inventions.
When offered $5,000 stock in a new invention called a telephone by Alexander Graham Bell's Telephone Company, Mark Twain declined preferring to invest $250,000 in a page typesetting machine. The machine complicated rather than simplified the typesetting process and was never finished. Twain lost the bulk of his fortune in the venture.
Twain also lost a great deal of revenue on royalties from his books being plagiarized before he even had a chance to publish them himself.
At the age of 60 Twain set off on a grueling year-long worldwide lecture tour to settle his debts. By October 1900, Twain had earned enough to pay off all his creditors.
Mark Twain photographed in 1908 via the Autochrome Lumiere process
WORKS
Samuel Clements' pen name came from when he used to be a riverboat pilot in Hannibal, Montana on the Mississippi. It was common to have a crew member throw a line out from the front of the boat to measure the depth shouting "Mark Twain" if it was a safe depth. A Mark is the same as a Fathom (6 feet) and Twain means 2. He patented his name as a legal trademark.
Twain wrote large parts of his books in bed. "Working in bed must be a very dangerous occupation since so many deaths occur there," he once quipped.
Mark Twain published his first successful short story, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," in The New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. He wrote the story in a cabin located at Jackass Hill, Tuolumne County, California (see picture below).
Photo by "Will Murray (Willscrlt). http://willmurraymedia.com.
His first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, was an 1867 collection of short stories including "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." It was Twain's first book and collected 27 stories that were previously published in magazines and newspapers. The book retailed at $1-25, but Twain was sold down the river and conned out of all his royalties ($1200) by his publisher, Charles H Webb.
Twain convinced Colonel McComb of the Alta California to pay for his passage aboard the steam packet Quaker City on an American excursion to Europe and the Middle East. The resulting humorous letters Twain produced for the newspaper reporting on the trip formed the basis of his first travel book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), a travelogue that pointedly failed to worship Old World arts and conventions. Sold by subscription, the book was a huge success and put its author in a spotlight he never willingly relinquished for the rest of his life. It was one of the one of the best-selling travel books of all time.
Convinced a typewriter could produce 57 words a minute following a salesman's demo in 1874, Mark Twain became the first author to buy one — Remington's Sholes & Glidden Treadle Model. He later said he had stopped using the "curiosity-breeding little joker" as it provoked too many questions from excited recipients of his typed letters.
The first novel written on a typewriter is said to be Mark Twain's the Adventures Of Tom Sawyer (1876) which drew on his youth in Hannibal. Originally he intended it as a play, before changing the work into a novel. Originally a commercial failure the book ended up being the best selling of any of Twain's works during his lifetime.
Front piece of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876 1st edition.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written by Twain about the growing friendship between a runaway slave Jim and the narrator Huckleberry, the scrapes they get onto the river and the characters they meet. The real Huckleberry Finn, who was a sort of 19th century Forest Gump, was Tom Blankensap, a childhood friend, whose father was the town drunk.
Published on February 18, 1885 in the US, at first The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was judged to be in appallingly bad taste due to its rustic dialect. The Concord Public Library, for instance, banned the book calling it "flippant, irreverent and trashy".
Today Huckleberry Finn is considered by some to be the first Great American Novel, and the book has become required reading in many schools throughout the United States. Ernest Hemingway said: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mr Twain called Huck Finn... It's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. Nothing comes before. There has been nothing as good since."
Cover of the book «Adventures of Huckleberry Finn», 1884
A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court published in 1889 was written by Twain about a time traveler from the America of his day who used his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to ArthurianEngland. A parody of romantic notions of chivalry, it was inspired by a dream of the author in which Twain was a knight himself, severely inconvenienced by the weight and cumbersome nature of his armor.
Chapters from My Autobiography are twenty-five pieces of autobiographical work published by Mark Twain in the North American Review between September 7, 1906 and December 1907. Mark Twain declared that he regarded the right way to do an autobiography was talking about whatever interested him at the moment rather than writing it chronologically. From his bed, Twain dictated nearly 2,000 pages of the book to his stenographer over three years. Rather than following the standard form of an autobiography, they comprise a rambling collection of anecdotes and ruminations.
APPEARANCE AND CHARACTER
Before it turned grey, Twain had a mane of reddish brown, usually overlong grizzled hair.
He had a roman nose, fair skin and a bushy brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a female's.
The American writer liked to wear grey to match his hair and eyes. Otherwise he wore white in winter and in summer-all white. Twain was known for his white suits.
Twain caricatured by Spy for Vanity Fair, 1908
His wife was embarrassed at Mark Twain's habit of calling on neighbors without a collar or necktie.
Twain had a favorite scarlet robe that was awarded to him by Oxford University.
Twain was absent minded, hot tempered and prone to swearing. Indolent, and a procrastinator, he called himself lazy. However, he was also productive and competitive.
Twain saw the joke in everything. Once, his friend William Dean Howells looked up at the clouds as the heavens opened and it began to rain. "Do you think it will stop?," he asked Twain." "It always has" replied the writer.
He had a vulgar sense of humor- Twain kept a log of every filthy story he ever heard.
RELATIONSHIPS
Twain first met Olivia "Livy" Langdon in December 1867, through her brother Charles. Their first date was attending a reading by Charles Dickens, in New York City.
Livy was slender, girlish, honest, dignified, cheerful. An invalid at 16 through falling on the ice, she was bedridden for two years with a partial paralysis. Then after a visit from a quack, she was able to walk a couple of hundred yards unaided.
Olivia in 1869
Livy also suffered from what was probably tuberculosis myelitis or Pott's disease at a young age. She continued to have health problems throughout her life.
They were engaged in November 1868 and got married on February 2, 1870. The wedding was at Livy's father's house in Elmira, New York and the ceremony was performed by the Congregational ministers Joseph Twichell and Thomas K. Beecher
Livy came from a wealthy liberal family and on marrying her, Twain inherited a great deal of money.
Their first child, Langdon, died after Twain unwisely took him for a drive on a raw cold morning and unaware to his father, the rug fell off his bare legs.
Three daughters were born: Olivia Susan (called "Susy") in 1872, Clara in 1874, and Jean (called "Jane") in 1880.
Their second child, Susy, died aged 24 in 1896 of spinal meningitis.
Livy died from heart failure in June 1904. She was cremated, and her ashes are interred at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira. Twain, who was devastated by her death, is interred beside her.
Jean died on Christmas Eve 1909 in a bathtub at her father's home after an apparent seizure.
Twain survived his wife and all but one of his children.
In 1893, Twain was introduced to industrialist Henry H. Rogers, one of the principals of Standard Oil. Rogers reorganized Twain's tangled finances, and the two became close friends for the rest of their lives.
Rogers' family became Twain's surrogate family and he was a frequent guest at the Rogers townhouse in New York City and summer home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. They were drinking and poker buddies.
BELIEFS
Twain was a Presbyterian, who was critical of organized religion and certain elements of Christianity through his later life.
Twain was an Universalist, believing all will be saved. He believed however that God is indifferent to man and on earththe devil has the upper influence.
A noted abolitionist and women's rights activist, Twain paid for the schooling of black people, including paying one man's tuition for Yale Law School.
The New York Times reported from Mark Twain's 70th birthday bash at Delmonico's, where the author said the secrets to old age were smokingcigars in bed and drinking barrels of cod liver oil.
PERSONAL LIFE
One of Mark Twain's favorite meals was pan fried porterhouse steak with mushrooms and peas.
Twain loved cats. Names of his cats included Stray Cat, Abner, Apollinaris, Motley, Fraevlein, Buffalo Bill, Soapy Sall, Cleveland, Sour Mash, Pestilence, Famine, Satan, Sin and Tammany.
HOBBIES
His own reading tastes were facts and statistics rather than fiction or story books.
Twain read Rudyard Kipling's Kim every year. "Kipling's name and Kipling's words...stir me more than do any other living man's", he wrote.
A visitor to the home of Mark Twain remarked upon the great number of books, many of which were littered about in piles all around the home. "You see" Twain explained "It is so difficult to borrow shelves."
Twain had a fascination with science and scientific inquiry and developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla. They spent quite a bit of time together from time to time in Tesla's laboratory, among other places.
Twain in the lab of Nikola Tesla, early 1894
In his Essays on 70th Birthday Mark Twain wrote. "I have never taken any exercise, except for sleeping and resting and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome."
Despite his claims of a lack of exercise the American writer was a keen walker. For years he went for a ten mile walk from Hartford to Talcott Tower every Saturday with his friend, Rev Twichell.
Twain's favourite game was billiards. (smoked and potted) and he also liked bowling.
HOMES
Twain's family moved to Hannibal, Montana when he was 4. Hannibal inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Twain moved into a substantial home in Buffalo, New York in February 1870 after marrying Olivia Langdon. After a couple of years he decided to move to Hartford, Connecticut, partly to be closer to his publisher.
The Twain family first rented a house at what was called Nook Farm in 1871 before buying land there and building a new house next door to Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Twain house in Hartford. By Makemake,
In the 1870s and 1880s, the family summered at Quarry Farm in Elmira, the home of Olivia's sister, Susan Crane. Susan had a study built apart from the main house so that Twain would have a quiet place in which to write.
Twain wrote many of his classic novels during his 17 years in Hartford and over 20 summers at Quarry Farm.
During the winter of 1877-78 Mark Twain put up the first ever telephone wire used in a private house.
Twain and his family closed down their expensive Hartford home in response to the dwindling income and moved to Europe in June 1891.
Twain, Livy, and their daughter Susy were all faced with health problems, and they believed that it would be of benefit to visit European baths. The family stayed mainly in France, Germany, and Italy until May 1895, with longer spells at Berlin (winter 1891/92), Florence (fall and winter 1892/93), and Paris (winters and springs 1893/94 and 1894/95).
Twain returned four times to New York while his family was in Europe, due to his enduring business troubles. He took a room in September 1893 at $1.50 per day at The Players Club, which he had to keep until March 1894.
Twain lived in his later years at 14 West 10th Street in Manhattan.
Twain's final home was in Redding, Connecticut. He lived there from 1908 until his death in 1910.
In 1909, Thomas Edison visited Twain at his home in Redding, and filmed him there. It is the only known existing film footage of Twain.
LAST YEARS AND DEATH
When the New York Journal ran a report about Mark Twain's death or immediate death, the writer realized they'd got him confused with his cousin, James Ross Clemens who had been ill but had since recovered. He sent a reply stating ending with "Report of my death greatly exaggerated".
On December 20, 1909 Mark Twain announced that he was done writing books and giving lectures. "The fact is I am through with work," he said. He would die four months later.
He died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut. Twain wrote on his deathbed in Memorandum, "Death the only immortal who treats us all alike whose pity and whose peace and whose refuse are for all-the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved."
Mark Twain was born on and died on days when Halley's Comet could be seen. He'd predicted in 1909 he would die when it was visible.
Twain's funeral was at the Brick Presbyterian Church on Fifth Avenue, New York. He is buried in his wife's family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York.
Nikola Tesla was born on July 10, 1856 in Smiljan, Austrian Empire (modern-day Croatia).
Tesla, aged 34, circa 1890. Photo by Napoleon Sarony
Nikola's father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church. His mother was a housewife who was of Serbian descent.
Tesla was born at midnight during a fierce thunderstorm. The midwife thought the storm was a bad omen, saying he would be a child of darkness. His mother replied, "No. He will be a child of light."
He was the fourth child out of five. He had one older brother, Dane, two older sisters, Angelina and Milka, and one younger sister, Marica.
The picture below shows Tesla's house (parish hall) in Smiljan where he was born, and the rebuilt church, where his father served. During the Yugoslav Wars, several of the buildings were severely damaged by fire. They were restored and reopened in 2006.
By I, MayaSimFan, Wikipedia
Nikola was able to do integral calculus in his head, leading his teachers to believe he was cheating.
Nikola Tesla had a photographic memory.
Nikola Tesla's childhood cat, Macak, played a role in his famous contribution to science. decades later, he reflected upon the experience of static electricity after he stroked his black moggy. In a 1939 letter to a 12-year-old he wrote, "Is Nature a gigantic cat? If so, who strokes its back? Day after day I have asked myself, what is electricity?"
Tesla got his first job in Budapest in 1882, working at a telephonecompany before moving to the United States two years later to work for Thomas Edison.
Edison once offered $50,000 to Tesla if he succeeded in improving the efficiency of his prototypical dynamos. Despite Tesla making a great deal of progress, Edison claimed that the offer was a joke.
They quarreled and soon Tesla started working on his own with other people investing in his work. He set up laboratories and companies to develop a range of electrical devices. On May 16, 1888 Nikola Tesla delivered a lecture describing the equipment which would allow efficient generation and use of alternating currents to transmit electric power over long distances.
Nikola Tesla's AC dynamo-electric machine in an 1888 U.S. Patent 390,721
Five years later, Nikola Tesla gave the first public demonstration of radio in St. Louis. In 1898, at the Electrical Exhibition held at Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla successfully demonstrated a radio-controlled boat. He was awarded U.S. patent No. 613,809 for a "Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles."
Nikola Tesla installed the first hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls in 1896. Around this time Tesla disavowed coal and oil in favor of renewable energy sources.
Nikola Tesla developed the idea for smartphone technology in 1901. By 1909, he'd conceptualized the first integration of data signals with telephony.
Tesla was 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) tall and weighed 142 pounds (64 kg) with dark, deep-set eyes, He had almost almost no weight variance from 1888 to about 1926.
He was also an elegant, stylish figure in New York City, a fastidious dresser who was fascinating company when he felt like being social. However, much of Tesla’s personal life remains a mystery, and he never married.
Nikola Tesla, c. 1896
The French actressSarah Bernhardt was romantically interested in Tesla; however, he rejected her on the grounds that she distracted him from his work.
Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain were good pals. They met at a club in New York and struck up a friendship. Tesla even helped Twain with some gastrointestinal issues by having Twain stand on an oscillating platform for 90 seconds, causing him to run for the bathroom!
He openly expressed disgust for overweight people. Once, Tesla fired his secretary solely because of her weight.
Nikola Tesla could not stand the sight of pearls, to the extent that he refused to speak to women wearing them.
Tesla was an advocate of sterilizing criminals and people with mental problems, and he believed that by 2100 people that aren't "desireable parents" shouldn't be able to breed.
Tesla was very fond of pigeons and took to feeding them at the window of his hotel room and bringing the injured ones in to nurse back to health.
Nikola Tesla once spent over $2,000 on an injured white pigeon. The amount includes building a device that comfortably supported her so her bones could heal. "I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life," he said of her.
In 1922, Nikola Tesla imagined that his favorite pigeon told him that she was dying. When she actually did shortly after, he said that "something went out of his life and he knew his life's work was finished".
Having spent most of his money, Tesla lived in a series of New York hotels, leaving behind unpaid bills. He died of coronary thrombosis in a hotel room in Manhattan, New York City on January 7, 1943.
During World War II, the Japanese built a death ray inspired by ideas from Nikola Tesla. The problem was that enemies would have to stand perfectly still for 10 minutes before it would work.
Nikola Tesla once paid an overdue hotel bill with a 'working model' of his 'death beam'. He warned the management never to open it without taking proper precautions to avoid detonation. After his death, the box was pried open and they found nothing but a bunch of old lab components.
Tesla's work fell into relative obscurity after his death. However in 1960 the General Conference on Weights and Measures named the SI unit of magnetic flux density the tesla in his honor. Since then his reputation has experienced a comeback in popular culture.
The statue of Nikoli Tesla in Silicon Valley provides free WiFi.
