Mark Twain: This much-loved author was an inventor too! 

There are very few kids who haven’t grown up reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, penned by none other than our favourite author Mark Twain. This Florida-born literary genius has many timeless pieces of work including travel accounts such as he Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883). Did you know that Mark Twain was his pen name? Yes, you read that right. Born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he was not only a world-renowned author and much-adored story-teller, Twain was also a patent-holding inventor. Here are three things that this great author invented! 

Adjustable Strap 
Mark Twain was a clever inventor who patented several ideas. One of these ideas is still widely used today and shows no signs of going anywhere soon. 

On December 19, 1871, when Twain was a resident of Hartford, a city in Connecticut, he received patent for his invention of adjustable strap, used for cinching clothes around the waist. Earlier, suspenders were used for the purpose. Twain found suspenders to be quite uncomfortable. The need for a better way to do without them led to this invention. He expected the strap to replace suspenders and tighten shirts around the waist. This adjustable strap was tied to the shirt’s back using buttons to hold it in place and make it simple to take off. The strap was made to use for ‘vests, pantaloons or other clothing needing straps,’ according to the patent application. Twain imagined the creation as a removable band that could ensure better fitting. Unfortunately, the product never truly took off in either the vest or trouser market. It’s because vests had buckles to tighten them, and trousers had gone the way of the horse and buggy. However, the strap evolved into a necessary component for brassieres and is still in use today. 

Scrapbook 
In his first patented invention, Twain designed a solution to a problem he encountered in his daily life. In his second patent, the solution was for a hobby that he was passionate about: Scrapbooking. In those days, scrapbooks had to be put together by manually gluing every piece, which was an excessively tedious and messy process. Twain had the habit of making and keeping scrapbooks throughout his life, filling them with trinkets, images, articles, and much more items. But he got sick and tired of wasting the rock-hard paste and the adhesive glue that had to be used. So, he stopped creating scrapbooks the old-fashioned way and created another of his invention, which he later copyrighted as a ‘self-pasting’ scrapbook. In 1873, Twain was granted a patent for his self-pasting scrapbook. Notably, people received this idea quite well and he sold over 25,000 copies. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, Twain earned $50,000 from the scrapbooks’ sales alone.  

The Memory Builder, a board game  
Twain’s luck with patents continued after these two inventions. In 1885, he received his last patent for a Game Apparatus that he labelled as the ‘Memory Builder’. The ‘Memory-Builder’ board game was designed to improve the recalling of dates and information in kids. Twain devised a method for playing it on a cribbage board (an English card game) by turning it into a historical chronology. It came with a packet of various coloured straight pins, and the rules were affixed to the front and back of the playing board. The game was not a commercial success. He tested several versions in 1891, but the general public seemed uninterested. Twain distributed a few prototypes to toy dealers, but there was little demand. So, the game never went for commercial production.