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

Jonnes, Jill

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375507396 ISBN 13: 9780375507397

Publisher: Random House, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Jill Jonnes is an author and historian with a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. She has received awards from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is the author of South Bronx Rising and Hep-Cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams. She lives with her family in Baltimore, Maryland.

Please visit www.empiresoflight.com

From the Back Cover

"[Empires of Light is] a very accessible and informative historical account that will be fascinating reading for a general audience as well as those with a more specialized interest." -Booklist
"Empires of Light is a thoroughly engaging and highly informative account of three inventors who pioneered the production and distribution of electricity. Without these three engineers the world would simply not be what we know today." –Henry Petroski, author of The Evolution of Useful Things
"[Empires of Light is] thoughtful and well paced." -Kirkus Reviews

"[Empires of Light is] a crackerjack account of the race for electrification." -San Francisco Chronicle

"Jill Jonnes' Empires of Light is the captivating–no, let's say electrifying–saga of the "War of the Electric Currents" fought at the close of the 19th century with typical Gilded-Age excesss by Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla and George Westinghouse. From the electrification of J. P. Morgan's New York mansion to Westinghouse's subjugation of Niagara Falls, Jonnes explains in human terms how alternating current achieved dominance over direct current, a victory of incalculable importance in the history of the world–and she tells the story with great, at times even macabre, verve, as in her account of the invention of the electric chair and its horrifying first use. Along the way she solves numerous little mysteries of electric power, among them why Broadway became nicknamed "The Great White Way." -Erik Larson, author of Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

“Empires of Light is a fascinating and vivid portrait of a tumultuous era. In a fast-paced narrative, Jill Jonnes recreates the personalities, technologies, and corporate intrigues that changed America by–literally–electrifying the nation.” -Lauren Belfer, author of City of Light

Reviews

Jonnes, a historian at Johns Hopkins (We're Still Here; Hep-Cats, Narcs and Pipe Dreams), details the rise and fall of the three visionaries who harnessed electricity, while also offering a critique of corporate greed. Her tale emphasizes the "War of the Electric Currents," in which Thomas Edison sought to defend the primacy of his direct current electrical system against George Westinghouse's higher-voltage and more broadly applicable alternating current system. Nikola Tesla, the somewhat kooky Serbian genius (and former Edison man), joined the fray on Westinghouse's side with his AC induction motor. Jonnes serves up plenty of color in an engaging and relaxed style, detailing how Edison capitalized on the "deaths by wire," or accidental electrocutions, from the AC system, sensationalized in the newspapers of the time. As she shows, Edison's "holy war" led to Westinghouse's AC being used in the first prison execution by electric chair, in 1890-which proved considerably more grisly and less humane than originally billed. For Jonnes, this history culminates neatly in a rather trite moral lesson: that corporate greed is bad. She contrasts it with the three public-minded men sketched here, who embody what Jonnes believes capitalism ought to be. Edison wanted only "the perfect workshop"; Westinghouse was interested "in helping the world" and giving his workers disability benefits; Tesla wanted to "liberate the world from drudgery." Jonnes's titans loom as monumentally as the allegorical Good Capitalists in an Ayn Rand melodrama. For those who view history as less tidy, this may strain the patience at times. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The study and awareness of electricity is not new, but the successful control and use of it is relatively recent. Jonnes begins by detailing the study of electrical phenomena from ancient times up through the Enlightenment. Audiences who are familiar mostly with Thomas Edison and the lightbulb will find the earlier, less-told part of the story a welcome addition to their knowledge. Naturally, Edison has his place, too, and Jonnes fills a number of pages with the accomplishments of the three major inventors (Tesla, Westinghouse, and Edison), starting with their early research and progressing into the practical application of their work. The last part of the book deals with the slow process of bringing electricity to the rest of the country, the industrial wars between the rival electric firms, and the fates of those who played a role in the electric revolution. A very accessible and informative historical account that will be fascinating reading for a general audience as well as those with a more specialized interest. Gavin Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

"Morgan's House Was Lighted Up Last Night"

In the late spring of 1882, Thomas Alva Edison, world famous as the folksy genius who had invented the improved telegraph and telephone, the amazing talking phonograph, and the incandescent light bulb, would shamble in occasionally to the hushed, formal suites of Drexel, Morgan & Company at 23 Wall Street, an imposing white marble Renaissance palace of mammon. There in a glass-walled back office, J. Pierpont Morgan presided at an oversize rolltop desk. The autocratic senior partner wore a banker's black suit, starched snowy shirt, wing collar, and fine gray silk ascot. His expensive, ever-present Havana cigar made the air smoky, redolent of privilege and power. Morgan's investment firm was partially bankrolling Edison's fevered building of America's first incandescent electric lighting system in the crowded commercial blocks of lower Manhattan. When Edison visited Drexel, Morgan, the clean-shaven, still boyish inventor loved to disparage the office's gaslight globes as burning a "vile poison." But soon the gaslight would be gone, preempted by Edison's beloved clean electric light.

Edison, thirty-five, was already a celebrated figure in the downtown streets, recognizable in his signature slouch-brim hat or battered stovepipe, shabby shirt, bright neckerchief, and frayed black Prince Albert coat. He and his crews were logging dusty eighteen-hour shifts as they pushed to finish the far-behind-schedule Pearl Street Station generating plant and install (only at night) fourteen miles of just-below-the-street electrical conduits. All morning and afternoon pedestrians ebbed and flowed through the financial neighborhood, dark-suited men sporting shiny top hats or black bowlers, clutching their canes. "Bank messengers, with bags filled with coin, greenbacks, bills of exchange, bonds and stocks, hurry along," wrote one contemporary of hustling-bustling Wall Street, "keeping a firm grip upon their bags and eying each person they pass warily, office boys, telegraph boys with yellow envelopes containing messages from all quarters of the globe, dart here and there through the throng." These acolytes of the high-toned, handsome financial district shared the jammed nearby streets with horse-drawn trolleys, heavy delivery wagons, dog-drawn rag carts, noisy oyster sellers, and small boys hawking any one of the city's dozens of newspapers. Everywhere, with the weather warming up, the city's streets reeked of horse piss and dung left daily by the 150,000 horses pulling the city's trams, trucks, Broadway stages, and fancy rigs. At night, when Edison most liked to work, he could be found with his Irish crews laying trenches somewhere near Pearl Street, already dirty with grease and tar, or tinkering with the six jumbo dynamos installed up on the reinforced second floor.

That late spring and summer, Edison had occasion to confer with J. Pierpont on another small but important job. In his office, Morgan cultivated a renowned ferocity: the gruff, impatient bark, the famed glare that challenged visitors of any rank to intrude. Other wealthy men in this most hirsute of eras flaunted complex and flamboyant beards and mustachios, but the forty-five-year-old Morgan sported only a plain, trimmed mustache. J. Pierpont Morgan had been raised an old money gentleman, conservative and stern in manner and habits. But the America of the 1880s was changing rapidly, daring men and women to dream bold dreams, to grasp for great ventures and great wealth. Just a few blocks south, the Roeblings' magnificent East River Bridge was nearing completion after thirteen arduous years, a soaring engineering marvel of suspension, floating across the shimmering New York waters. Nearby, the elevated railroads with their small belching steam engines chugged stolidly along, high above the chaos and stench of Manhattan's tangled traffic, astounding visitors with their efficient moving of tens of thousands of workers as they snaked north between tenements and offices and then out to the far bucolic reaches of the city. The miracle of the great Atlantic cable flashed telegrams across the coldest depths of the ocean. Where once letters from Pierpont's father in the London office took weeks to arrive, now telegrams pulsed through in mere minutes. The railroads had become mighty, creating new cities where there had been only marshland or prairie. In just the past year, they had laid an astounding ten thousand miles of track. The 1880 census showed fifty million Americans. Morgan, unlike many of his old money peers, relished this new temper of the times, admired men like Edison who were bold, ambitious, hardworking, confident.

Late that spring, Morgan, who had just returned from a long European tour, had briefly put aside his considerable business concerns and announced to Edison an audacious decision. He was going to personally showcase the advantages of Edison's pioneering incandescent light in his elegant Madison Avenue brownstone, just then in the throes of top-to-bottom renovation. Morgan's Italianate mansion would become, thereby, the first private residence in New York to be illuminated solely by electricity. This was, of course, no simple matter. Nonetheless, the imperious Morgan wanted the electricity installed and working by the time he, his wife, Fanny, and their three teenage children moved in that fall from their country estate, Cragston, up the Hudson River. Edison was delighted to oblige, for it would be a great coup to have Morgan's personal imprimatur on what many dismissed as a dangerous and exotic novelty. Whatever people thought of J. P. Morgan, no one thought him a fool. Money men had learned that he was decisive, intelligent, and swift of action, and above all, he kept his word, no small matter when spectral figures liked Jay Gould preyed upon the stock market.

And so, as the shad were about to make their annual run up the Hudson River, a crew of Edison workers clopped up in a horse-drawn wagon to Morgan's nearly renovated mansion at 219 Madison on the northeast corner of 36th Street. They laboriously excavated a large earthen cellar beneath the wooden stable, their shovels rhythmically slinging dirt and rocks into a growing pile. Within the musty space of the dirt cellar, they installed a squat steam engine and boiler to power two electric generators, all of which displaced Morgan's carriage horses to a nearby stable. The men also dug a ditch connecting the new cellar to the house, lined it with bricks, laid in the electrical wires, and bricked it over. Inside the mansion, decorator Christian Herter supervised the snaking of insulated electrical wires up through the elaborately wood-paneled and plastered walls where ordinarily the gas lines would have gone. These wires were then threaded through to every space in the mansion, and new electrical fixtures were installed. In some rooms electrical wires hung straight down every few feet from small holes in the tall ceilings, sprouting at their tips several small light bulbs.

On Thursday, June 8, 1882, Edison Electric Company president Major Sherbourne Eaton wrote Edison, "Morgan's house was lighted up last night. I was not there but I am told that the light was satisfactory and that Morgan was delighted. The armature of the 250 light [bulb] machine sparked badly. It will have to be changed at once. Vail took charge of that. Herter was present and declared himself entirely satisfied. Morgan is pleased with everything but Herter's fixtures." By fall, as the New York social season opened, the Wall Street financier and his family were installed in their new home with its 385 electric lights, casting a soft, even, incandescent glow everywhere, from the servants' halls and butler's pantry to the bedrooms and the "Japanese manner" reception room and sitting room. The Romanesque dining room with its high oak paneling was particularly striking, for there electric lights cast a lovely jeweled radiance through the twelve-foot-square stained-glass skylight.

The deluxe Artistic Houses rhapsodized about every rich and costly detail of Morgan's newly renovated brownstone residence, gushing especially about the vast and splendiferous terra-cotta drawing room, where "a breath from the Graeco-Roman epoch of Italia seems to have left its faint impress on the walls, or rather its faint fragrance in the atmosphere . . . amid the aroma of perfect taste." This must have pleased Morgan, who disdained the obvious vulgarity of many of the new Gilded Age millionaires. His house was meant to convey an aura of money and power, subtly burnished by his European education, culture, and worldly intelligence. What was genuinely new and unique was Edison's electric light. "Each room is supplied with it, and, in order to illuminate a room, you have simply to turn a knob as you enter. By turning a knob near the head of his bed, Mr. Morgan is able to light instantaneously the hall and every room on the first floor, basement, and cellar-a valuable precaution in case of the arrival of burglars." This assumed burglars did not prowl and enter in the middle of the night. Because, as Morgan's son-in-law Herbert Satterlee explained in a memoir of Morgan, "The generator had to be run by an expert engineer who came on duty at three p.m. and got up steam, so that at any time after four o'clock on a winter's afternoon the lights could be turned on. This man went off duty at 11 p.m. It was natural that the family should often forget to watch the clock, and while visitors were still in the house, or possibly a game of cards was going on, the lights would die down and go out." Then there was a careful groping about in the sudden murk to light beeswax candles and kerosene lamps.

Yet that was the least of Morgan's problems as a proud pioneer consumer of electrical power. Each silvery winter afternoon, the noise of the city day ebbed away in the genteel and moneyed streets on Murray Hill. Then the delicious still of the indigo evening mingled only with the occasional soothing clip...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375507396
• ISBN 13: 9780375507397
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 416