Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.

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.

Conquering Gotham, Eiffel's Tower, and Urban Woods are all written by Jill Jonnes. She has earned multiple Ford Foundation awards and has been named a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar. She resides in the city of Baltimore, Maryland.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780375758843
ISBN 10	0375758844
Title	Empires of Light
Author	Jill Jonnes
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	2004-10-12
Number of pages	464
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.