Lettre autographe signée de Mark Twain à un destinataire inconnu, édition originale

AUTOGRAPH LETTER SIGNED. Mark Twain, author of Tom Sawyer and Hucleberry Finn, whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), was in Vienna in the summer of 1898. There he met the Austrian Edison (born in Poland), a certain Jan Szczepanik (1872-1926), an inventor and former schoolteacher who invented the teletroscope, an instrument that was supposed to enable images to be transmitted over long distances using electricity.

Mark Twain compiles a brief biographical sketch in a humorous article for Century Magazine entitled "The Austrian Edison keeping school again".
The situation is indeed laughable. Szczepanik, then a young Moravian schoolteacher gnawing at the bitterness of not being able to bring his ideas to life, was sacked because of his frequent trips to Vienna on his working days. And the loss of his status as a teacher caused him some curious hassles, as Twain remarked in his letter:

"Yesterday I wrote a page about Szczepanik's bi-monthly resumption of his school duties to satisfy the requirements of war & sent it to the Century Magazine".

Once again a civilian without exemption privileges, he was caught up by the law and obliged to serve his time in the army, 3 years of bayoneting in peacetime, when he could be leading mankind to new technological heights. An official found a way around this, and Szczepanik's military obligations were reduced to what Twain tells us in his article: "He must go back to his village every two months, and teach his school half a day-from early in the morning until noon; and, to the best of my understanding of the published terms, he must keep this up the rest of his life! I hope so, just for the romantic poeticalness of it".

Funny, isn't it? That's how Twain sees it, in any case, in the conclusion to his letter:

"The Austrian War Department has one well-developed quality, anyway - humor. Sincerely yours, SL Clemens".

A superb, humorous letter from the author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn