Extremely interesting story of how electricity came to power the machinery of America and how AC power became the main thing over DC power. Also includes the stories of Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla, three important figures involved with electricity. Highly recommended ! ( )

Surprisingly good. Did not understand it all but the story behind the building of electricity was captivating. ( )

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 works, and that's fine, it was what I was looking for right now, though it wouldn't have hurt a bit more of explanation. ( )

A fascinating account of the war of electrical currents. Split into ten chapters, the book talks about Edison developing the light bulb and focusing on DC, Tesla being a genius and far ahead of his time, and Westinghouse being a businessman from Pittsburgh with a background dealing with machines.

The major arguments against AC were the dangers of the current, and that nothing used AC. No one could figure out how to produce AC current without brush contacts. However, DC had its own issues with the limits how far the current could travel. A generator would have to be built in each building and only had an effective distance of around half a mile or so.

So Edison and his group focused on Safety, while Tesla and Westinghouse used AC since it was more economical. So AC wins out in the end, but the journey there involved a ton of interesting stories. Like the first Public Execution with Electricity, or how some fellow named Harold Brown used AC to torture animals in order to prove that it was dangerous. ( )

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, the far sighted business mogul, all dreamed of spreading the power of electricity throughout the world. Highlights include the bank runs of 1894, Chicago World's Fair, Niagara Falls and the financial panic of 1907. The outcome of the competition between direct & indirect current systems is now taken for granted but vital at the time. All the original characters eventually lost control of their business to financial backers. The book was published in 2003 but somehow strangely current with this 1894 quote "many Americans had come to view the notion as a struggle for it's very being, putting the rich against the ordinary folk". The comprehensive approach to the subject provides a more satisfying approach to US History the lists of battles and politicians. ( )

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 works, and that's fine, it was what I was looking for right now, though it wouldn't have hurt a bit more of explanation. ( )

Written like a novel with much supposition, it nevertheless has enough to give a historian an idea what was going on. ( )

I seem to have a bad track record in picking technology. I was one of those who plumped for HD-DVD instead of the now-ubiquitous Blu-Ray; I was obsessed with my MiniDisc player long after music companies had stopped bothering to release anything on the format; and back home, in a cupboard somewhere, my family still has the old Betamax player that I remember trying to get excited about while all my friends had gone with VHS. It was better, I'm telling you!!

So I sympathise with those on the wrong side of the original standards war – the nineteenth-century showdown between DC and AC electricity. At stake was limitless commercial opportunity, as American cities gradually became convinced of the benefits of adopting electric power; and each side of the debate had its own big-name champions.

In the red corner, for DC, the Wizard of Menlo Park himself – Thomas Edison. He pumped millions of dollars and several years of his life into the quest to find a practical commercial lightbulb, and DC power was the lynchpin of his schemes for expansion.

Against him, in the blue corner, was a dream combination of genius industrialist George Westinghouse, and crazed ahead-of-his-time dreamer Nikola Tesla, who both saw the possibilities of AC.

The battle was astonishingly acrimonious, and full of bizarre turns. When the state of New York began to consider whether electricity might make a more humane alternative to hanging as a form of capital punishment, Edison and his DC supporters immediately wrote to the authorities to recommend AC power, hoping to rebrand their opponents' standard as ‘the executioner's current’. (The first victim of the electric chair was indeed executed – messily and not quickly – by alternating current in Buffalo in 1890.)

It has become fashionable in this narrative to revere Tesla as a maligned visionary, and consequently to cast Edison as an uncreative drudge who just happened to be superbly well funded. There is a grain of truth somewhere in this, but it's also clear that Tesla could be difficult and he was not good at communicating (let alone monetising) his ideas. His catalogue of OCDish, quasi-autistic foibles didn't help:

He (silently) counted each step he took as he made his early morning walk down to the Ivry factory. Every activity ideally had to be divisible by three (hence the twenty-seven laps each morning in the Seine). Before eating or drinking anything, he felt obliged to calculate its cubic contents. He deeply disliked shaking hands with anyone. He had a ‘violent aversion against the earrings of women,’ pearls above all. ‘I would not touch the hair of other people except, perhaps, at the point of a revolver.’ The mere sight of a peach brought on a fever. Moreover, Tesla could (and happily did) recite long swathes of Serbian poetry from heart.

He sounds amazing fun, but a bit of a nightmare as a business partner.

In the end, Tesla was right but naïve, while Edison was wrong but stubborn. George Westinghouse (the unexpected hero of the book) found the best balance. The fact is that DC power is simply very inefficient and expensive over long distances, and a new generator was needed in every square mile to be powered – one every few blocks, in town. AC, by contract, can be transmitted vast distances, so that a remote hydroelectric station can light up cities that are many miles away.

I would have liked more scientific detail on the physics behind all this, and as it was I had to supplement this book with various enlightening excursions to Wikipedia and YouTube. Jonnes also allows herself to get a bit carried away on occasion (‘one of those delicious fall Saturdays where the very air shimmers sweetly, full of life's promise and yet tempered by autumnal tristesse’…tristesse, really?).

Nevertheless, this story of America's Gilded Age and the personalities behind the electric revolution is very well told. It was a time of remarkable, almost unbelievable scientific progress, and progress moreover that was immediately pumped visibly into commercial circulation. It wasn't like the Higgs Boson; a breakthrough in the lab on Monday would be crowbarred onto the High Street by the weekend. The effect must have been like living in a science-fiction novel. (But then what do I know; I said the same thing about my Betamax.) ( )

Electricity - something that is much in the news lately thanks to Superstorm Sandy and the impact of power outages in the Northeast, but over one hundred years ago, during the final decades of the19th century, three visionaries fought over the world and how it should be electrified.

The most famous was, of course, Thomas Edison, and with his invention of the incandescent light bulb, he jumped to the forefront. Most people, if asked will name Edison as the chief person responsible for the electricity that we know today, however, Edison was insistent on the DC (direct current) version of electricity whereas Nikola Tesla, a Serb immigrant, and one-time Edison employee, devised an AC (alternating current) generator and along with George Westinghouse championed the AC current we know today.

Edison was the darling of the media because of previous inventions (phonograph, stock ticker, vote recorder) and his creation the incandescent light bulb, while Westinghouse was content to sit in the background - his inventions of the railroad air brakes and automatic signaling systems increased safety but weren't glamorous. Westinghouse worked to improve products stating "My ambition is to give as many persons as possible an opportunity to earn money by their own efforts." He was a man for the labor forces - giving higher wages, ½ day Saturdays, disability benefits, and pensions.

Westinghouse invented the first transformer which allowed Alternating Current service for small wider areas while Edison's DC company could not handle anything that was not within a short distance of the power plant. Yet Edison was furious that Westinghouse was cutting in on his action. Edison expected that the entire electrical empire should belong to him.

Edison fought ruthlessly against the advancement of the DC current contingent even attempting to discredit its safety by having NY state use it for their death penalty executions.

However, the Westinghouse Electric Company was successful in showing the benefits of the AC when they were awarded two much sought after contracts - the lighting of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and the Niagara Falls Power plant (in conjunction with N. Tesla). Each of these projects was a major prize for Westinghouse, and insult to GE (Edison had already been bought out).

But as much as Westinghouse armed with Tesla's patents was able to electrify larger areas, he still had to deal with money men and several times in the last decades of the century he was put into difficult financial positions. Once, to stave off the company floundering, Tesla agreed to forgo royalties (estimates of $17.5 Million in his lifetime) for his patents so that the Westinghouse Electric Co. would stay afloat and continue to champion the Alternating Current path.

In the Panic of 1907 when national banking and finance had a meltdown, Westinghouse was forced to file for bankruptcy even though the companies were profitable. European expansion had drained his cash and he was unable to pay certain loans. He lost control of Westinghouse Electric and his spirit was broken. But his vision for the betterment of all, not just the elite continued and thrived to this day.

The alternating current envisioned by Tesla and put into reality by Westinghouse has made it possible for the amazing advancements through the 20th and into the 21st century. ( )

A very well researched and written historical novel. Reads like a fast-moving, suspenseful fiction piece. Only complaints: paragraphs could get pretty long and I really, really wish there were more diagrams. There were some really basic ones at the beginning, but it would have been cool had they carried on and shown how the more complex technologies operated as the meat of the story developed. ( )

Empires of Light has the characters and storyline of a TV drama, but is educational to boot. There's Edison--brilliant, visionary, and such a hard worker he lived at Menlo Park, rarely visiting his family. Obsessed with retaining the upper hand in the blossoming electricity industry, he went so far as to stealthily endorse electricity as a new method of execution, but only his competitors' brand. Nicola Tesla, a young prodigy whose ideas ranged from the revolutionary to the fantastic, was deathly afraid of women's earrings. George Westinghouse, hardworking industrialist, refused to crumble under extreme pressure from a new breed of economic powerhouse, the mega-corporation General Electric. The story of how America became electrified is also that of an adolescent nation defining itself in the midst of the industrial revolution.

I thought it was good. The author seems to focus on the wardrobe a bit much for me but I guess it helps to create the image. The last chapter after they started the plant at the falls probably could have been left out. I would have liked more of the afterword fleshed out.

Relatively interesting history, entertainingly told. But told thoroughly from secondary sources, which made it less immediate. ( )