Currents of Genius

About This Book

For ten thousand years, night was a wall. Then, in a single human generation, three of the most remarkable men of the age tore that wall down — and fought a bitter, brilliant war over how it would be done.

Thomas Edison, the deaf Ohio newsboy who became the Wizard of Menlo Park and switched on a city. Nikola Tesla, the visionary Serbian immigrant who arrived with four cents and a dream of a motor driven by a spinning ghost of magnetism. George Westinghouse, the courtly Pittsburgh magnate who armed alternating current for battle. Their collision — the War of the Currents — was fought with patents and propaganda, with electrocuted animals and the first man in the electric chair, and it decided the shape of the electrical age.

E.B Cohen tells the whole sweeping story, from Thales rubbing amber in an ancient Greek market, through Franklin's kite and Faraday's motor and Maxwell's beautiful equations, to Pearl Street, the White City, and the moment the thunder of Niagara Falls was turned into light for a distant city. Along the way, in plain and vivid language, you will come to understand not just what these rivals did but why it worked — why a moving magnet makes electricity, and why one current could cross a continent when the other could barely cross a city.

This is the complete history of the invisible force that runs through everything — the spark, the system, and the three flawed geniuses who gave us the light.