He lost everything at 60. Then he did something no bankrupt millionaire had ever done.
Mark Twain—America’s most beloved writer, the creator of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn—stood in the ruins of his fortune in 1894. The mansion, the fame, the comfortable life built on literary genius: all of it was collapsing.
The culprit? An obsession with a machine.
In 1880, Twain met James Paige and his typesetting machine—a mechanical marvel with 18,000 moving parts that promised to revolutionize printing. Twain didn’t just see an investment; he saw a path to Rockefeller-level wealth. For 14 years, he poured money into it: $300,000 total, roughly $9 million in today’s currency. Every penny he’d earned from his books and lectures went into that machine.
The device was almost perfect. Almost. It kept breaking down—one gear, then another, then another. Meanwhile, a simpler machine called the Linotype quietly conquered the market. By 1894, Twain’s publishing company collapsed. At 59 years old, he owed creditors over $100,000 (about $3 million today).
The man who’d satirized American greed and foolishness had gambled everything and lost.
Here’s where the story becomes extraordinary.
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