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.
Why Should You Read This Book?
Have you ever flipped a switch? Vacuumed a rug? Turned the key on your car? Gone out at night and walked easily down a street? Then the story told in this book is part of your story. Electricity is what makes the modern era possible, and the story of moving it from a "mysterious fluid" to the workhorse of the world begins in earnest with three men. All three are famous, all three have voluminous biographies and a documentary or two. But Jonnes entwines their stories together in a way that is often more edifying than focusing in separately; for each of them needed the others to give us the modern world (though they definitely didn't see it that way at the time!). One was a workaholic public relations master, one a respected captain of industry, one the archetype of the head-in-the-clouds dreamer: Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, and Nikola Tesla.
Jonnes' portrait of Edison has all the classic notes we expect: workaholic, media favorite, inventor of the light bulb that made all this practical. But this work also reveals his darker side--particularly his underhanded (or at least knowingly accessory to) actions in the "War Between D.C. and A.C." Because of his stubborn refusal to adapt to the long-distance systems of alternating current, he figures largely in the opening chapters but fades into the background later.
Westinghouse is not an inventor, but he is the man who makes electric power practical--one of the first men to see the importance of patents, corporations, and what would become the modern "research department." His contribution to safety in transportation and businesses cannot be overstated. He is one of the founders of the modern world, because he financed and produced the things that made it. In our day he would be traduced as an "evil capitalist," yet in his own day he was known for his concern for his workers and deliberately invested in technologies that would make the world safer. He was probably the most intriguing figure in this book.
Tesla is the man who gave us an A.C. motor--and made the modern world possible. He was also the original prototype of the mad scientist. He invented tech his peers could only dream of, claimed he could do things with science that we still can't replicate, liked to run electricity through his body as a "pick-me-up," and could never focus on real-world concerns. He was a natty dresser, a friend of famous men like Mark Twain, and an utter dreamer. There is no better way to sum up the man than to say that his best friend late in life...was a pigeon.
Light and Life
The book begins with the installation of electric light in the home of J.P. Morgan, a titan of Wall Street finance, in 1882. It ends with the generation of electric power at Niagara Falls being shipped to Buffalo-the first long-distance transfer of mass electric power ever--in 1896. This is only a period of fourteen short years, but it contains enough drama and technological advancement for lifetimes. Through it all there are money squabbles, back-room deals, cutthroat tactics, courtroom drama, the Chicago World's Fair of 1892, and so much more. If you want to understand the scientific confidence of the turn-of-the-century western world, if you want to understand mad scientists and massive corporations, finance and invention (and how they are intertwined), if you want to understand what happens when you switch on the vacuum or flip the light switch, then this book should go on your list.
