Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World

Jill Jonnes

Random House Publishing Group, Oct 12, 2004 - History - 464 pages

The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires. At the heart of the story are Thomas Alva Edison, the nation’s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; the Serbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer who revolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic George Westinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrial idealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentiful electricity and worked heart and soul to create it.

Edison struggled to introduce his radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York City as Tesla and Westinghouse challenged his dominance with their alternating current (AC), thus setting the stage for one of the eeriest feuds in American corporate history, the War of the Electric Currents. The battlegrounds: Wall Street, the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on the tense walk down a prison hallway and into the sunlit room where William Kemmler, convicted ax murderer, became the first man to die in the electric chair.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - Rose999 - LibraryThing

If you are looking for a highly technical book then this one isn't for you, the book is more about the business and people that made electricity possible today than about explaining how the science ...

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - MM_Jones - LibraryThing

Fascinating account of the travails of bringing electricity into modern life. Thomas Edison, the legendarily stubborn folksy inventor, Nikola Tesla, the true electrical genius, and George Westinghouse ...

Contents

• Morgans House Was Lighted Up Last Night: 3
• Endeavor to Make It Useful: 17
• The Wizard of Menlo Park: 51
• Our Parisian: 87
• He Is Ubiquitous: 117
• Edison Declares War: 141
• Constant Danger from Sudden Death: 165
• The Horrible Experiment: 185
• Fear Everywhere of Worse to Come: 215
• The Electricians Ideal City 2 47: 251
• What a Fall of BrightGreen Water: 277
• Yoked to the Cataract: 301
• Afterward: 335
• Acknowledgments: 371
• Photograph Credits: 399

About the author

Jill Jonnes is an author and historian with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She has received awards from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is the author of South Bronx Rising and Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams. She lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
• Author: Jill Jonnes
• Edition: illustrated, reprint
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2004
• ISBN: 0375758844, 9780375758843
• Length: 464 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / Historical; History / United States / 19th Century; Science / Physics / Electricity