The Power Makers

In 1800 America was an agrarian nation, whose wealth came largely from the land and was extracted only with backbreaking toil. A century later, the country was an industrial superpower and the most advanced material society the world had ever seen. The Power Makers is the story of that transformation and of the dynamic, fiercely competitive men who made it happen.

The steam engine; the incandescent lamp; the electric motor—inventions such as these replaced musclepower with machine labor, turned darkness to light, and reshaped every aspect of daily life in the span of a few generations. They were the product of an extraordinary cast of characters: dogged inventors like James Watt and Elihu Thomson; charismatic entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse; daring capitalists like Charles Coffin of General Electric and J.P. Morgan. Others include Samuel Insull, onetime assistant to Thomas Edison, who invented the modern utility business and brought power to millions, and Nikola Tesla, the eccentric Serbian immigrant whose revolutionary AC motor came to him in a vision. Striding among them like a colossus is the figure of Thomas Edison, who was creative genius and business visionary at once.

With consummate skill, Maury Klein recreates their discoveries, their stunning triumphs and frequent failures, and their unceasing, bare-knuckled battles in the marketplace. Their personalities, and their fierce rivalries, leap off the page. The Power Makers is a saga of inspired invention, undaunted persistence, and business competition at its most naked and cutthroat—a dazzling tale of America in its most astonishing decades.