Mark Twain Went Broke Trusting an Inventor Who Told Him What He Wanted to Hear

By the late 1880s, Mark Twain, the American author famous for Huckleberry Finn, had put much of his fortune behind James W. Paige, an inventor in his full time employ who was building an automatic machine to set type for printing. Twain put in the bulk of his book earnings plus much of his wife's inherited fortune, the equivalent of roughly 10 million dollars today, and lost it all. He went bankrupt.

Twain confessed that he always believed Paige when Paige was in the room. "When he is present I always believe him — I cannot help it," Twain admitted. "He is a most daring and majestic liar."

Paige appears to have been a capable inventor, but his strongest skill appears to have been persuading rich backers to keep paying for a machine that was not ready. That is the charismatic habit of bending other people's sense of what is possible.

Twain was then wealthy and busy, and he never worked on the machine himself, managing Paige by letter while Paige did the building. The essay likens that distant supervision to what programmers now call vibe coding, describing what you want and letting an AI assistant do the work.

In that arrangement, Paige combined "sycophantic industriousness" with "gaslighting," in the essay's terms, meaning eager, hard work paired with misleading assurances about progress. The essay's reading is that Twain received misleading written reports that gave him the feeling of moving forward, while he never confronted the breakdowns, repairs, and fixes the machine required.

Twain said that when Paige was gone, the belief evaporated: "When he is gone away all the belief evaporates."