This chapter explores the American discourse surrounding three scientists/inventors: Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Albert Einstein. All three are regarded as “great” in the areas of science and quantitative intelligence. Due to that, each is also elevated more broadly into wisdom curators, individuals who ought to possess great answers to questions beyond their expertise. These instances betoken Americans’ belief that greatness in one field ought to translate into some near-mystical sort of intuition in all others. In all three cases, greatness was remarkably compromised. America’s reaction and reassessment suggest something very important about the contours of great men in the United States.

In Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Ève future (1885–6), a fictional version of Thomas Edison builds a mechanical female automaton as a replacement for a human woman. This chapter reads the novel and its gynoid Hadaly as works of decadent speculative fiction. After tracing the relationships of L’Ève Future to decadence as a literary movement via late nineteenth-century writers such as J.-K. Huysmans, Paul Bourget, and Arthur Symons, it argues that the work’s decadent tropes and commitments allow it to place a critical spin on automata and automatism. Villiers’s vision of automacy – as alluringly artificial yet both relational and entangled in cultural norms about the human – not only exceeds the analogous ventures of the real-life Edison but also resonates with attempts to come to terms with the nature and functions of autonomous artificial entities today.

A 100 percent WWS energy infrastructure involves electrifying or providing direct heat for all energy sectors and then providing the electricity or heat with WWS. The solution also requires interconnecting geographically dispersed WWS generators on the grid. Because electricity and the grid are such a large part of the solution, understanding how both work is important. This chapter discusses these issues along with the battle between George Westinghouse/Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison to determine whether alternating current (AC) or direct current (DC) would predominate worldwide. Finally, the chapter discusses how transformers, motors, and generators work.

Mark Twain lived in an era of profound scientific and technological change, in which he was very interested. He followed the debate over evolution, with wide reading in Darwin and other scientists. He also kept up with advances in geology, and he was involved in geological and archeological digs. He was an avid reader in natural history, with a special interest in insects. His interest in science found its way into his writing, such as the key use of fingerprinting in Pudd’nhead Wilson, and especially in his late unpublished writing, when he contrasted science with religion. Twain was keenly interested in technology and inventions, and he was an early adopter of inventions like the typewriter, the telephone (he claimed to have the first telephone in a private residence), and the bicycle, among others. He was a friend to both Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla, visiting Tesla’s laboratory to be involved with experiments in electricity, and allowing Edison to both record his voice and film him with his moving camera.

In 2008, the First Sounds project digitally scanned and converted the paper tracings of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, recreating sounds that hadn’t been heard since the middle of the nineteenth century. Never intended to be played back, Scott’s phonautograms belong to a world in which writing was the universal standard for other media and literature was often the test case for new media technologies. But even by the time of Thomas Edison’s tinfoil phonograph in the late 1870s, that orientation was changing. This book analyzes the relationships of print literature to other media in the late nineteenth century, a time when an astonishing array of new media technologies were imagined, invented, and adopted. It argues that writers became vernacular media theorists as they traced systematic relationships between different forms of print and nonprint media, and it brings the history of books and printed writing into closer contact with the interdisciplinary field of media archaeology.