Great are the powers of electricity....It makes millionaires. It paints devil's tails in the air and floats placidly in the waters of the earth. It hides in the air. It creeps into every living thing....Last night it nestled in the sherry. It lurked in the pale Rhine wine. It hid in the claret and sparkled in the champagne. It trembled in the sorbet electrique....Small wonder that the taste was thrilled and the man who sipped was electrified...energy begets energy. (from the Buffalo Morning Express, January 13th, 1897, after the city had been electrified)
I rather desperately wanted to write this on Joe Rigney's new Emotional Sabotage. But if you're one of the four people who reads my stuff, you've already heard of that one. So I decided to do something a bit more unknown. So our candidate for this month, flouncing into the (electric) spotlight in all her shy glory, is Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World by Jill Jonnes (2004). In this highly readable historical work, we are treated to visions of how a substance that we moderns take for granted--electricity--sparkled and crackled its way into American life at the end of the 19th century.
