In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
  • Neil M. Cowan (bio)
Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. By Jill Jonnes. New York: Random House, 2003. Pp. xiv+416. $27.95.

In Empires of Light Jill Jonnes has captured some of the drama in America's second industrial phase, the era when generating plants were being constructed to replace gaslights, a moment of dramatic transition in American life when people came to the cities, entered factories, and began to be paid by the hour. Two inventors, one businessman, and two investment bankers provided much of the impetus for that transition. J. P. Morgan and August Belmont financed Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse and launched a new industry; later, quite rightly, they took it away from Edison and Westinghouse, who did not understand that manufacturing is everything and inventors are expendable.

Westinghouse lost his company in the crash of 1907. After the banks called in their notes that October, Westinghouse received a one-way ticket out—a rich man with little left to do but dream of his past and how he had been treated by people he thought were colleagues. General Electric was born when Morgan combined Edison General Electric with Thomson-Houston. Edison became two million dollars richer, but his name was removed from the building. The real hero of this story is Nikola Tesla, who loved working in his lab and developing new uses for electricity. Tesla came to learn that no good deed goes unpunished. When Westinghouse was in financial trouble, Nikola suggested to his friend George that his royalty payments stop. They were not restarted when Westinghouse's fortunes improved, and Tesla spent the last years of his life nearly homeless.

Westinghouse and Edison were determined that all of America—indeed, the world itself—would purchase their generating equipment and light bulbs. As their companies expanded they believed, rightly, that more and more people would turn off kerosene or gas lights and turn on electric ones. Edison was the shrewder, a man of two faces: to the public, an inventor [End Page 652] who loved nothing more than being in his laboratory and coming up with new ideas; privately, a clever manipulator who understood the value of public relations. Jonnes relates the story of his using surrogates to plant newspaper and magazine articles that portrayed Westinghouse's alternating current as a deadly application of electricity, so deadly that it should only be used in executions; her chapter on the electric chair's first customer should only be read when a meal is not in the offing.

But in the end Jonnes fails to do justice to the larger story. A more complex depiction of not just the forces that made the electrical industry grow but also its application in industrial nations well beyond America's shores, one that drew on Thomas Hughes's Networks of Power, would have made Empires of Light a richer examination of the United States from the end of the Civil War to the twentieth century.

Neil M. Cowan

Neil Cowan is an independent scholar who specializes in oral history interviewing. With Ruth Schwartz Cowan he is working on a prosopography of American women engineers.

...

pdf

Share