March 17 Thursday – At the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, Austria, Sam, instead of waiting to meet the banker Ludwig Kleinberg at 4 p.m., sent for him at breakfast. There he agreed to a two -month option at Kleinberg’s price of $1.5 million, payable in installments and extendable by request, for American rights to the Raster, invented by Jan Szczepanik (see Mar. 16 entry). Sam would receive a twelve percent commission if he sold the rights for that amount. Sam also got the rights to a second more advanced-design machine at a ten percent discount over any other offers, as well as first refusal for a different device, a machine that would weave cloth from peat moss [NB 40 TS 13-14]. Note: Dolmetsch points out that they shook hands on the contract, which still needed to be signed before a notary [200].

Sam then began a letter to H.H. Rogers (that he finished on Mar. 20) outlining the option he’d taken, the possibilities for profit and statistics from the potential market. It all reminds of the excitement and projected calculations he’d immersed himself in with the Paige typesetter. Sam worked hard to reel Rogers into the invention investment; he was directive in the sort of way he’d been years before with Howells:

I’ve landed a big fish to-day. He is a costly one, but he is worth the money—worth it because America has got to buy him whether she wants to or not. It isn’t a type-setter, which people may take or leave, as they choose.

…

You are now to do as follows—and don’t be trying to shirk:

You will run up to the Cheney Silk mills at South Manchester, 8 miles from Hartford; or, you visit mills nearer New York; and you will also post yourself in other ways; and when you’ve got accurate statistics in place of my faulty ones, you will then run over here a fortnight after you receive this, and examine the machine and its work. And then you will run back home and get up a Company of about $5,000,000 or $10,000,000, and take my fish off my hands, and give me one-tenth of that Company’s stock, fully paid up, for my share. …

…

I think you better make a $2,000,000 Company, and pay the money all in, in 3 or 4 instalments. That will buy the patents and furnish a deal more capital than is necessary, besides.

And I think the Standard Oil should take the whole of it [MTHHR 327-33]. Note: Sam’s business plans were rarely modest ones.

Note: One can only imagine Rogers’ initial reaction to Sam’s latest boondoggle, after all his help at climbing out of debt from the Paige typesetter debacle and the failure of Webster & Co. Alas, there are no extant replies from Rogers for the next year, and all we know of Rogers’ communications we have in Sam’s responses.