Mark Twain, Tesla, and Edison

For Christmas my wife gave me Mark Twain's recently released autobiography. This put me on the path to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" which I'm reading on the train these days. I was pleased to find out that Mark Twain was very interested in science and technology. He liked to note that he was born during an appearance of Haley's comet, and that he would die when the comet returned (he did!) Wikipedia notes that there was a lot of tech talk in Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (one of my favorite books from high school days). Twain was close to Nikola Tesla. The wonderful picture (above) shows him in Tesla's lab. He was filmed by Thomas Edison (YouTube version below).