Empires of Light
Author: Jonnes, Jill
ISBN: 9780375758843
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE US
Year first published: 15 Nov 2004
Pages: 464
Format: Paperback / softback
With characters such as J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, William Vanderbilt, Michael Faraday, and Benjamin Franklin, EMPIRES OF LIGHT is an incredible melding of science and history, invention and magesty. Here is the story of the race between three titans of the Gilded Age to bring electricity to the world.
Plt;bPgt;The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.Plt;/bPgt;Plt;brPgt;Plt;brPgt;In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of AmericaP#8217;s Gilded AgeP#8212;Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George WestinghouseP#8212;battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Plt;iPgt;Empires of LightPlt;/iPgt;, 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 nationP#8217;s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the worldP#8217;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. Plt;brPgt;Plt;brPgt; 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 WorldP#8217;s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamberP#8212;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.
ISBN: 9780375758843
Publisher: RANDOM HOUSE US
Year first published: 15 Nov 2004
Pages: 464
Format: Paperback / softback
With characters such as J.P. Morgan, Joseph Pulitzer, William Vanderbilt, Michael Faraday, and Benjamin Franklin, EMPIRES OF LIGHT is an incredible melding of science and history, invention and magesty. Here is the story of the race between three titans of the Gilded Age to bring electricity to the world.
Plt;bPgt;The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.Plt;/bPgt;Plt;brPgt;Plt;brPgt;In the final decades of the nineteenth century, three brilliant and visionary titans of AmericaP#8217;s Gilded AgeP#8212;Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George WestinghouseP#8212;battled bitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Plt;iPgt;Empires of LightPlt;/iPgt;, 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 nationP#8217;s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the worldP#8217;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. Plt;brPgt;Plt;brPgt; 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 WorldP#8217;s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamberP#8212;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.
