April 21 Thursday – At the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, Austria, Sam replied to H.H. Rogers’ letter (not extant) of American marketplace facts for the Raster textile-designing machine.

You have furnished me facts which are intelligible—and worth a good deal more than foggy guesses gotten out of a census-report 18 years old.

I think that your investigations are likely to establish one very important thing: to-wit, that the designer has no existence in America, and that the introduction of a new pattern there is not common, but unusual. I find that many of the Austrian factories use the same old designs, year in and year out.

When I hear from you next I shall know its American value—if it have one. Meantime—as the men have conceded—it is best left alone in these war times.

Sam then wrote that Charles Langdon left the day before and he didn’t mention the Raster project to him. He related Ludwig Kleinberg’s visit of the night before and the basics of another machine which made cloth from peat mixed with cotton or wool. “Peat is plenty in most countrys, and is a sure crop and not subject to defeat by capricious weather.” Sam wasn’t sure Rogers would be interested in this other investment. He planned on traveling to England in “ten or twelve days” to market the idea there, and maybe by that time the idea of war with Spain would have passed and Rogers could “take a holiday and come to London.”

Sam closed with several brief items: Frank N. Doubleday wrote (not extant) advising against the “publication of that note about the de luxe” Uniform Edition; Sam was prepared to pay Mt. Morris Bank an additional $1,000 if they could satisfy Rogers that the account was correct; Charles Frohman at the Savoy Hotel in London wanted to see Sam’s play (likely Bartel Turaser; see Mar. 22 to Rogers); and his desire to let George Barrow “sweat and fume and cuss,” over interest he was demanding on the old

Webster debt. If he wrote Barrow, Livy wouldn’t let him send it, so “what’s the good?”