Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to

Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World

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 Americaâ€™s Gilded Ageâ€”Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouseâ€”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 nationâ€™s most famous and folksy inventor, creator of the incandescent light bulb and mastermind of the worldâ€™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 Worldâ€™s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamberâ€”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.
Country USA
Brand Random House Trade Paperbacks
Manufacturer Random House Trade Paperbacks
Binding Paperback
ItemPartNumber 9780375758843
Color Black
ReleaseDate 2004-10-12
UnitCount 1
EANs 9780375758843

Country	USA
Brand	Random House Trade Paperbacks
Manufacturer	Random House Trade Paperbacks
Binding	Paperback
ItemPartNumber	9780375758843
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2004-10-12
UnitCount	1
EANs	9780375758843

Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World