Cornell class of 1902 · electrical engineer from Scipio, Utah · author of the February 1939 Improvement Era article
Thomas J. Yates served as a Latter-day Saint missionary in the Southern States from 1895 to 1898, then left Utah for Cornell University, graduating in 1902 as an electrical engineer — details given in the Improvement Era’s own note on him. In 1900, as a student, he was introduced to Andrew Dickson White, Cornell’s first president and then US ambassador to Germany, who invited him back to talk about Mormonism; Yates says the invitation grew out of White’s conversation with Tolstoy. Nearly four decades later he published his memory of that evening, and with it the sentence that has been circulating under Tolstoy’s name ever since.