Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
by Jill Jonnes
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jill JonnesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-10-12
ISBN: 0375758844
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
Book Review: Takes an integrative approach (engineering, societal issues, financing).
Summary: 5 Stars
EMPIRES OF LIGHT by Jill Jonnes is a 416 page history book. There are 16 pages of black & white photographs. Generally, the book is written at the level of a 16 year old. On the other hand, a couple of the chapters in this book cannot be understood without taking a college class in corporate business or financing. Also, for full appreciation of the book, you need to take a short course in electronics. The writing is not thorny or difficult or mannered. The cast of characters includes J. P. Morgan, Elisha Gray, Michael Faraday, and a handful of others. Elisha Gray was the inventor of the telephone. To learn more about Gray and his competitor, Alexander Bell, I recommend another fine book, THE TELEPHONE PATENT CONSPIRACY OF 1876 by A. E. Evenson. I also recommend, THE GATE:THE TRUE STORY OF THE DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE, by Van Der Zee, which takes the same integrative approach in weaving together the relationships between corporate engineers, engineers in academia, financiers, and societal issues.
EMPIRES OF LIGHT provides fine journalistic writing to break up technical details relating to corporate financing and patents. Here is an example (page 247): "George Westinghouse was hurtling along in his private railcar, the Glen Eyre . . . locomotive began to clang its bells urgently, for it was speeding into an industrial amphitheater [Chicago] . . . endless reaches of factories, marshaling yards, slaughterhouses, grain elevators, iron mills, slag heaps . . . soot-covered cable cars." The following are some high points from the book:
CHAPTER 5. We learn that Westinghouse (W.) invented a car replacer for fixing derailed trains, and a metal device for preventing derailing at junctions, an air brake (invented at age 22). In 1881 (age 34), he bought patents claiming train signals, and hired H.Byllesby away from Edison, to develop light bulbs for W. In 1885, W. read an article on alternating current (AC) generators and AC transformers, and decided that the future of the world resided in far-off waterfalls turning AC generators, and long-distance transmission of AC. The article was about the Gaulard-Gibbs system. W. bought the patents of Lucien Gaulard and John Gibbs (p. 123). We learn that Michael Faraday had actually invented the very first transformer and generator in 1831. Faraday's machines worked only with AC, because AC created the required magnetic field. W. re-designed the Gaulard-Gibbs transformer. We learn that all of W.'s electricians were against AC at first. In 1886, W. demonstrated use of AC to transmit 500V, in conjunction with transformers to step down the voltage to 100V (suitable for use for lighting in homes). By 1886, W. had 27 customers. But at this point, Edison initiated his hate campaign against AC, which involved public executions of dogs using AC (p. 139).
CHAPTER 6. We learn about a Rumanian boy who was killed from AC from downed wires. This occurred April 15, 1888 on East Broadway near Catherine St. in Manhattan. This and other accidents enabled Edison to argue more strongly against AC. At this point in time, Edison had 121 DC stations, and Westinghouse had 22 AC stations. W.'s biggest roadblock was lack of an AC motor, while Edison's biggest roadblock was that DC power generating plants could only serve people in a 1/2 mile radius (p. 144). In 1887, the price of copper increased, to the benefit of W., because AC generators needed 1/3 as much copper as DC generators. At this time, W. owned the incandescent light patents of Framer, Maxim, and Weston. Also, at this time, Tesla (age 31) was busy inventing and filing patents on AC machines (dynamos, induction motors, transformers). An example of Tesla's breakthroughs was use of 2 alternating currents that were out of step with each other ("polyphase"). In May 1888, W. contacted Tesla via his employee H.Byllesby, and in July 1888 Tesla went to Pittsburgh to work for W. (p. 163).
CHAPTER 9. We learn that Edison's source of funding was J.P.Morgan, while W.'s source of funding was his own wealth and stockholders. In late 1890, a huge bank in England (Baring Bros.) collapsed, and there was also an economic crisis in the U.S. W. raised money by creating and selling stock, with the help of August Belmont & Co., and by begging Tesla to give up the royalties on his patents (Tesla complied) (p. 229). As one might expect in any book about Tesla, we learn about his colorful attributes (elegant clothes, phobia of germs, and a parlor trick of running high voltages through his body) (pages 226, 227, 230, 273). Edison also had financial troubles, as his source of funding (North America Bank) collapsed.
CHAPTER 10. Please remember, that the main issue in this book is AC versus DC. W. and Edison had submitted bids to light the Chicago World's Fair of May 1893. The DC bid submitted by Edison/Thomson-Houston/General Electric was for $577,485, and the AC bid of Westinghouse/Charles Terry was for $480,694. AC won. To light the Fair, W. needed to design around Edison's patents, so he designed and mass-produced a stopgap electrical light called the "stopper lamp." At the Fair, W.'s generators were turned by oil engines designed by Allis-Chalmers. Here is a history of Allis-Chalmers acquired from the internet site devoted to this company's tractors: "Allis-Chalmers' history as a manufacturer extends to the 1840's in Milwaukee. In 1914 the company started building farm equipment. Allis-Chalmers grew to become one of the largest and most diverse manufacturers in North America. However, Allis-Chalmers became the victim of rapidly changing financial times and was eventually forced to sell the farm equipment division to K-H-Deutz AG of Germany in 1985."
CHAPTER 11. We learn of the Cataract Construction Co., formed by 103 lawyers and bankers, for converting Niagara Falls into a power station, using ten 5,000 hp turbines. Bids were submitted by W. (AC generator), by Edison GE (also AC), and by Thomson-Houston (DC generator). The Edison GE plan was apparently based on a design stolen from Westinghouse, and GE's president Charles Coffin was one of the accused.
CHAPTER 12. A glitch in the Niagara project was that an engineer, George Forbes, somehow got control of the project, and dictated that the generators should make 22,000 volts of AC at 16 cycles/second (totally impractical specs). Eventually, Westinghouse won the contract, and build the generating plant in a workable fashion (p. 305). (The book is not really clear on how Forbes got control, or on how W. finally got control.)
CRITIQUE. The book fails to provide any organized account on how the United States decided on 60 cycles per second. While different values for this frequency are disclosed, here and there in the book, the book really needs to provide an organized account on how 60 cycles per second became the standard. Another shortcoming, is that the book should do a better job at identifying the various courtroom cases, and at listing the relevant patent numbers. However, for the interested reader, the book should have gone a step further to list the relevant patent numbers. While the book does contain some schematic diagrams of electronics, these are not enough to educate the beginner on the workings of motors, generators, and transformers, and I was left with the feeling that the author really does not care much about the topic of her book (early advances in electronics). Margaret Cheney's fine book on Mr.Tesla provides a dozen or so patent numbers. With these numbers in hand, any reader can get the patents for free at espacenet dot com, or at uspto dot gov. Espacenet provides patent images that are of much higher quality, than those from uspto.
To conclude, this book will be highly readable, for those with some sort of background in at least one of these things: corporations, financing, electronics, or patents. I recommend this book to any person interested in how the "modern world" came to be. I liked EMPIRES OF LIGHT, and also THE GATE by John Van Der Zee, for the same reasons. Both books take an integrative approach in their writing, and disclose relationships between private engineers, academic engineers, financiers, and issues generally affecting society, as it relates to a common engineering goal.
Summary of Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
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.
From the Hardcover edition.
Jill Jonnes's compelling Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World offers a multi-sided tale of America's turn-of-the-20th-century quest for cheap, reliable electrical power. Along the way, the book profiles key personalities in both the science and industry of electrification and dramatizes the transformation of American society that accompanied the technological revolution. As her sub-title suggests, Jonnes's focus is on the three great personalities behind the building of the electricity industry. But, as she makes clear, the electrification of America was much more than a pathbreaking scientific quest. The genius of such poet-scientists as Nikola Tesla depended on the more finely tuned business skills of George Westinghouse and the towering capital of J.P. Morgan to achieve actualization. And even Thomas Edison and Westinghouse--innovative industrial combatants in the war between AC and DC current--were victims of the far more powerful and conservative financial forces of Wall Street. Indeed, for Jonnes, the story of electricity is as much about the legions of patent attorneys and bankers who controlled the flow of industry as it is about the circulation of current. Her sophisticated portrait of Gilded Age science, business, and society brings new light to the forces that underlie technological revolutions. As she reveals, it is not so much the great public men of science who directed the destiny of America's eventual empire of light; rather, the path was solidified by those men behind the scenes who were wise enough (and perhaps ruthless enough) to impose their legal, financial, and political dominance onto the scientific innovation--a valuable message for all eras. --Patrick O?Kelley
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