MARK TWAIN AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY WRITERS ABOUT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Stephen CRABBE University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom Abstract: Mark Twain is still widely known for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), but no longer for his writing about science and technology. Yet, Twain’s interest in science and technology, and particularly scientific and technological innovation, was woven into much of his fictional and non-fictional writing throughout his life. Furthermore, not only was Twain an enthusiastic advocate of science and technology, but he was also an enthusiastic advocate of clarity, consistency and conciseness in writing and his writing advice remains timely and relevant to modern writers about science and technology. This paper brings together some of this writing advice and shows its continuing relevance and importance to scientific and technical writers in the twenty-first century. Keywords: Mark Twain; twenty-first century writers about science and technology; clear, consistent and concise writing
1. Introduction Although it has been over one hundred years since the death of Mark Twain (the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910), he is still widely known for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and their depictions of sleepy, small-town life in rural southern America before the advent of the American Industrial Revolution in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, he is no longer widely known for his writing about science and technology. Yet, born in 1835, Twain lived through the height of the American Industrial Revolution and his interest in science and technology and particularly scientific and technological innovation, as evidenced in his writing, continued until his death. To illustrate, in Twain’s short story From the ‘London Times’ of 1904 (1898), the narrator envisions a global communication network connected by telephone. This fictional “‘limitless-distance’ telephone” of 115 years ago closely resembles the modern-day smartphone. “The improved ‘limitless-distance’ telephone was presently introduced, and the daily doings of the globe made visible to everybody, and audibly discussible, too, by witnesses separated by any number of leagues. […] The connection was made with the international telephone-station, and day by day, and night by night, he called up one corner of the globe after another, and looked upon its life, and studied its strange sights, and spoke with its people, and realised that by grace of this marvellous instrument he was almost as free as the birds of the air […].” (1898)