March 16 Wednesday – After writing Amelia S. Levetus, a meeting was arranged for this evening, and the young inventor, Jan Szczepanik, visited the Clemens’ suite at the Metropole. The invention Sam was most excited about was the Raster, a labor-saving machine for electrically copying graphic images directly into woven fabric. Sam was ever-enamored of labor-saving devices.

Sam’s notebook of Mar. 18 relates what he did prior to the evening meeting:

I spent the 16th in gathering American statistics at our Consulate-General (the youngest were 18 years old!)

British ones through Mr. Wm. Lavino, Correspondent of the London Times: he got others for me by telephoning the British Consulate.

I ciphered on the data, & wrote 11 pages of questions; & when the inventor & his capitalist (Mr. Ludwig Kleinberg) arrived at 9 with Miss Levetus & Dr. [Alfred] Winternitz, I was ready for business, & rich with my new learning. My extraordinary familiarity with the subject paralyzed the banker for a while, for he was merely expecting to find a humorist, not a commercial cyclopedia—but he recovered presently.

We talked till midnight & then parted: I to think over the data & the price ($1,500,00) & we to meet again at 4 p.m. to-day. (18th) [NB 40 TS 13] (Editorial emphasis.)

Note: the banker was Kleinberg, who Dolmetsch writes “was eager to sell and suggested a price of $1.5 million. Clemens said he would ‘sleep on it’ and meet the banker again at four the next afternoon”

Sam’s notebook for Mar. 20:

The patents for England & Germany are sold, & negociations for the sale of Italy, France, the Netherlands &c are going on.

Were going on; but Wednesday night [Mar. 16] I asked Mr. Kleinberg to stop them, & postpone them indefinitely. I placed before him a scheme for concentrating the patents for all the world in the grip of a single giant company. The world has a capital of $1,500,000,000 invested in the industry affected by this invention— an invention able to reduce one of its very important expenses 90 per cent [NB 40 TS 15].

Dan De Quille (William Wright) died in West Liberty, Iowa, at the home of his daughter “Mell.” De Quille had moved from Nevada back to Iowa, his birthplace, in July of 1897 [Salt Lake Tribune Apr. 25, 1898].

Hiram M. Stanley, American philosopher, reviewed FE in Dial, p. 186-7. Tenney quotes Stanley: “A first-rate specimen of that eminently sagacious mixture of sense and nonsense which is so characteristic of him” [29].