There’s little action, no sound, and the footage is grainy. But this brief clip may be the only existing video of writer Mark Twain and his daughters Clara and Jean. It was captured in 1909 by inventor Thomas Edison.
Mark Twain died a year after this footage was filmed, but here we are—over a century later—watching him walk and laugh. [YouTube via Open Culture via Roger Ebert]
Memory [Forever] is our week-long consideration of what it really means when our memories, encoded in bits, flow in a million directions, and might truly live forever.