Although author Mark Twain made a great deal of money with his books, he died in debt due to a series of bad investments. One of these investments was a device that was intended to attract comets and bring them crashing down to the earth. There are two possible reasons he would fund such an unusual device. One suggestion is that he was trying to make Halley's Comet show up early. He had long said that he was linked to the comet and would die when it returned. He might have been trying to superstiously end his own life by having the comet show up sooner than expected. The other suggestion is that his well-known misanthropy was at work and he was trying to destroy the world by having a giant comet crash into it.