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

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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 titansof America’s Gilded Age—Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse—battledbitterly as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empiresof Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their rivetingand ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, andhard-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 bulband mastermind of the world’s first direct current electrical light networks; theSerbian wizard of invention Nikola Tesla, elegant, highly eccentric, a dreamer whorevolutionized the generation and delivery of electricity; and the charismatic GeorgeWestinghouse, Pittsburgh inventor and tough corporate entrepreneur, an industrialidealist who in the era of gaslight imagined a world powered by cheap and plentifulelectricity and worked heart and soul to create it.

Edison struggled to introducehis radical new direct current (DC) technology into the hurly-burly of New York Cityas 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 ChicagoWorld’s Fair, Niagara Falls, and, finally, the death chamber—Jonnes takes us on thetense 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.