Book Review: Empires of Light

[bedsitter23]

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

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Internet memes will tell you Tesla good, Edison bad. Life, of course is more complicated than that.

This book focuses on the battle to light the world. Edison arrives with Direct Current. On one hand, it's safe. On the other hand, it's completely impractical in the idea of lighting the world on large scale. As the competition, George Westinghouse and the team behind Direct Current.

Edison is the workaholic genius. He is unhip these days, but he really is an American legend. His fault may be that he wants to get paid every time anyone uses one of his invention, but that is a human failing that I think any of us would feel sympathy toward.

Westinghouse, the businessman is hardly a caricature either. So private, biographers struggle to understand him. One might guess he was one of the Robber Barons of the day, but he wasn't. He wanted to make money, lots of it, for sure, but he is generally well-liked and put money back into his business.

With stakes so high, it's no surprise that it's a Knock-down drag-out fight with lawsuits over patents and worse. Proponents of Direct Current warn of the dangers of the new technology, going so far as advocating for Alternating Current be used as the preferred method of execution.

There are two major battles in this war. The first is the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, in which Westinghouse pulls off the improbable. The next is a few years later in which Westinghouse (with Tesla's technology) manages to harness the power of Niagara Falls.

This book is in the mode of recent History books made popular by Erik Larsen. There are plenty of antidotes and trivia. Jonnes gives us a decent history of Electricity before Edison comes onto the scene. It makes for an interesting story. At times, it does get dense, even tedious; and at times, Jonnes's writing is if not amateur-ish, at least blog-ish.

It is interesting, of course, someone was the first to realize if I turn off a few lights in my house, I can save some money. I don't need to have the every room lighted. Ha!

Tesla is an interesting character. A genius but also an eccentric. To his credit, he saved the Westinghouse company, by giving them control of his patents. The world essentially owes Tesla for the use of electricity and radio, with little benefit to himself.

He does for the most part, live a charmed life because of it, as a celebrity inventor. He is wildly eccentric (everything he deals with has to be divisible by three) and as he grows older, no one is willing to invest in his grand ideas. It's the great "What If?"- would his grand ideas have revolutionized the world in amazing ways, or would they have been a colossal waste of money. In any case, JP Morgan and others would not be willing to take the gamble. One also wonders how much we lost when a fire destroys Tesla's lab and many of his notes.

It is interesting of course to think of electricity as a new technology, and how wondrous it must have been, and so exciting, it spread quickly. This book had a lot of interesting stories and with the caveats above, I enjoyed it.



View all my reviews