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What it argues
Empires of Light is Jill Jonnes's history of the War of Currents — the late-nineteenth-century battle between Thomas Edison's direct-current electrical system and George Westinghouse's alternating-current system, with Nikola Tesla as the third figure whose genius made AC practical. It's a business and technology story, but also a story about ego, capital, and how major infrastructure decisions get made in the absence of technical consensus.
Jonnes structures the book around three protagonists. Edison is portrayed as a brilliant but increasingly stubborn businessman who had too much invested in direct current to evaluate AC honestly. He waged a PR campaign against AC that included publicly electrocuting animals — including an elephant — to demonstrate its dangers. Westinghouse is the industrialist who recognized the commercial potential of AC and had the organizational capacity to deploy it. Tesla is the tragic genius: a visionary inventor who designed the AC induction motor and polyphase system that made long-distance power transmission possible, then signed away his royalties to save Westinghouse's company and died poor.
What it gets right
- 1.
The War of Currents was decided less by technical superiority than by economics: AC could transmit power over long distances at much lower cost, which made Edison's position untenable regardless of his PR efforts.
- 2.
Edison's campaign against AC — including public animal electrocutions — is a case study in how incumbents use fear and misinformation to slow the adoption of superior competing technologies.
- 3.
Tesla's AC induction motor and polyphase system were genuine scientific breakthroughs. Without them, long-distance electrical transmission would have required a different approach or more time to develop.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jill Jonnes is an American historian and urban writer based in Baltimore. She is the author of several books on American industrial and urban history, including South Bronx Rising, Conquering Gotham (about the building of Penn Station), and Eiffel's Tower. Her work focuses on the intersection of technology, capital, and urban development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has been a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and contributes to publications including the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
