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.
Empires of Light is the gripping history of electricity, the
“mysterious fluid,” and how the fateful collision of Edison, Tesla,
and Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.
From the Hardcover edition.
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