Empires of Light

Jonnes tells the history of electrification in the United States through three figures: Thomas Edison, who built the first commercial direct current system in lower Manhattan; George Westinghouse, who backed alternating current and had the industrial capacity to deploy it; and Nikola Tesla, whose polyphase alternating current motor made the system practical. The narrative runs from the 1870s through the Niagara Falls power project of the mid-1890s.

The substance is the current war. Edison's direct current worked only over short distances and required generating stations every mile, which made it viable in dense city centres and nowhere else. Alternating current could be transformed to high voltage for transmission and back down for use, which meant one large plant could serve a region. Edison's response was a public campaign about the dangers of high voltage, including his involvement in the use of alternating current for the first electric chair execution. He lost the technical argument, and lost control of his own company when it was merged into General Electric by financiers who wanted the alternating current patents.

Jonnes works from company records, patent litigation and contemporary press. For investors the case is about standards competition: the winning technology was chosen by the physics of transmission economics, not by the strength of the incumbent or the quality of its marketing, and the incumbent's founder was removed by his own financial backers when he refused to switch. The book is popular history and its treatment of Tesla is more sympathetic than more recent scholarship supports, particularly on the later years and the Wardenclyffe project.