I’ve been very interested in Nikola Tesla’s discoveries of late. I’d seen this 1894 picture before of Mark Twain (aka Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens) in Tesla’s lab but that was before I was interested in Tesla and I didn’t give it much thought.

In the picture, Twain is holding Tesla’s vacuum lamp, powered with electromagnetic energy from a Tesla coil.  You can see Tesla in the background, looking at the author.

Twain was apparently very interested in electricity. That’s funny, isn’t it? Mark Twain is so strongly associated with an America gone by, in the days before electricity. An America of rafts and riverboats, of small towns, and little boy pranks. Twain was America refined and distilled. Tesla was a man of the future. In his mind lived seeming impossibilities, like remote control, illumination, and engines that could power every day life. Tesla was a man of magician-like abilities brought on by the lightning,

The first time the legendary author and inventor met at Tesla’s lab, who knows what Twain was expecting. A meeting between these two titans of culture would undoubtedly produce something extraordinary. It did—something Twain clearly didn’t anticipate.

Nikola Tesla told Twain that when he was young and still lived in the Austrian Empire, he came down with a deadly case of cholera. For nine months, he was very ill and twice hovered near death.

Here is the rest of the story in Tesla’s words:

“One day I was handed a few volumes of new literature unlike anything I had ever read before and so captivating as to make me utterly forget my hopeless state. They were the earlier works of Mark Twain and to them might have been due the miraculous recovery which followed. Twenty-five years later, when I met Mr. Clemens and we formed a friendship between us, I told him of the experience and was amazed to see that great man of laughter burst into tears.”

Can you imagine what Mark Twain must have felt, standing in the laboratory of this genius engineer who was transforming the world, and hearing from Tesla himself that he had made a profound difference in the inventor’s life?

I love how Tesla described Twain: “that great man of laughter.”  I feel certain Mr. Clemens would have appreciated that very much.