Mark Twain on invention

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone, or any other Important thing–and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite–that is all he did.

- letter to Anne Macy. Reprinted in Anne Sullivan Macy, The Story Behind Helen Keller (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, and Co., 1933), p.162.

Mark Twain: we are sewing machines re-weaving old threads.

Mark Twain on “originality”:

Old Man: Whatsoever a man is, is due to his make, and to the influences brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations. He is moved, directed, commanded by exterior influences – he originates nothing, not even a thought.

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Old Man: Shakespeare created nothing. he correctly observed, and he marvelously painted. he exactly portrayed people whom g-d had created; but he created none himself. let us spare him the slander of charging him with  trying. Shakespeare could not create. he was a machine and machines do not  create.

Young Man:   Where was his excellence, then?

Old Man:   In this. He was not a sewing-machine, like you and me; he was a gobelin loom. the threads and the colors came into him from the outside; outside influences,  suggestions, experiences (reading, seeing plays, playing plays, borrowing ideas, and so on), framed the patterns in his mind and started up his complex and admirable  machinery, and it automatically turned out that pictured and gorgeous fabric which  still compels the astonishment of the world. If Shakespeare had been born and bred on a  barren and unvisited rock in the ocean his mighty intellect would have had no outside  material to work with, and could have invented none; and no outside  influences, teachings, moldings, persuasions, inspirations, of a valuable sort, and  could have invented none; and so Shakespeare would have produced nothing. In turkey  he would have produced something-something up to the highest limit of Turkish  influences, associations, and training. In France he would have produced something  better-something up to the highest limit of the French influences and training. In England he rose to the highest limit attainable through the outside helps  afforded by that land’s ideals, influences, and training. You and i are but sewing-machines. We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out gobelins..