Zoom

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

Name: Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World
Brand: Random House Trade
SKU: 9780375758843
Price: 14.99 USD
Availability: InStock

$14.99 $20.00

Discount: $5.01 (26%)

Hurry Up! Only 2 Left in Stock!

Out of stock >

Guarantee safe & Secure checkout

Availability: Only few left!

Contributors:

Jill Jonnes

Publisher:

Random House Trade

Binding:

Paperback

Book Category:

Technology & Engineering, Science

Book Subcategory:

History, Electrical, Physics

Book Topic:

Electricity

Edition Description:

Rh Trade PB Edition

Shipping & Return +

The product is eligible for a complimentary return within 30 days from the date of purchase. Furthermore, individual items are shipped within 24 hours of receiving the order.

Rating and Reviews +

Specifications +

Release Date:

2004-10-12

ISBN 13:

9780375758843

Weight:

0.75 lbs

Size:

8.04 x 5.22 x 0.99 inches

Pages:

464

Mint Condition +

product description

Description

The gripping history of electricity and how the fateful collision of Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.

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.

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.

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

Description

Fundamentals of Electrical Substations

Fundamentals of Electrical Substations

Recently Viewed Products

Recently viewed products

Secure Payment

Online Offers

Quick Refunds

Curated Items