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Fiction.
Thriller.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ? ??A world of invention and skulduggery, populated by the likes of Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla.???Erik Larson
??A model of superior historical fiction . . . an exciting, sometimes astonishing story.???The Washington Post From Graham Moore, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game and New York Times bestselling author of The Sherlockian, comes a thrilling novel??based on actual events??about the nature of genius, the cost of ambition, and the battle to electrify America.
New York, 1888. Gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but the miracle of electric light is in its infancy. The person who controls the means to turn night into day will make history??and a vast fortune. A young untested lawyer named Paul Cravath, fresh out of Columbia Law School, takes a case that seems impossible to win. Paul??s client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question: Who invented the light bulb and holds the right to power the country?
The case affords Paul entry to the heady world of high society??the glittering parties in Gramercy Park mansions, and the more insidious dealings done behind closed doors. The task facing him is beyond daunting. Edison is a wily, dangerous opponent with vast resources at his disposal??private spies, newspapers in his pocket, and the backing of J. P. Morgan himself. Yet this unknown lawyer shares with his famous adversary a compulsion to win at all costs. How will he do it?
In obsessive pursuit of victory, Paul crosses paths with Nikola Tesla, an eccentric, brilliant inventor who may hold the key to defeating Edison, and with Agnes Huntington, a beautiful opera singer who proves to be a flawless performer on stage and off. As Paul takes greater and greater risks, he??ll find that everyone in his path is playing their own game, and no one is quite who they seem.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
??A satisfying romp . . . Takes place against a backdrop rich with period detail . . . Works wonderfully as an entertainment . . . As it charges forward, the novel leaves no dot unconnected.???Noah… (más)
Novela sobre la vida de Tesla, Edison y Westinghouse muy bien entrelazada y amalgamada por la figura del abogado Paul Cravath. Es demasiado lento hasta la quinta parte del final en que se acelera la acción y culmina de forma elegante ( )
The author of The Sherlockian (2010) presents another twisty historical novel set at the end of the gaslight era. This time the story takes place in a New York City perched on the very precipice of electricity. The book's central focus is on American ingenuity as the basis for commercial success and the so-called war of currents waged between ThomasEdison, George Westinghouse, and NikolaTesla over the creation of the lightbulb. Paul Cravath, the brilliant but inexperienced lawyer hired by Westinghouse to countersue the pugnacious Edison for copyright infringement, unscrupulous behavior, and even violence, provides a first-person perspective. Legal battles and the rancor between scientists drive the pace, while a curious romance unmasks yet another underhanded charade. Woven into this complex drama is a philosophical question about invention: Who is the inventor: the one with the idea, the one who makes a working model, or the one to obtain the patent? Who really did invent the lightbulb?
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
I have not failed. I've just found ten thousand ways that don't work. —Thomas Edison
People don't know what they want until you show it to them. —Steve Jobs
Don't you understand that Steve doesn't know anything about technology? He's just a super salesman.... He doesn't know anything about engineering, and 99 percent of what he says and thinks is wrong. —Bill Gates
No rational argument will have a rational effect on a man who does not want to adopt a rational attitude. —Karl Popper
Whoever lives for the sake of combating an enemy has an interest in the enemy's staying alive. —Friedrich Nietzsche
In this business, by the time you realize you're in trouble, it's too late to save yourself. Unless you're running scared all the time, you're gone. —Bill Gates
Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. —Steve Jobs
The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it. —Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Before anything else, preparation is the key to success. —Alexander Graham Bell
Dedicatoria
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
FOR MY GRANDFATHER, DR. CHARLIE STEINER, who first taught me to revere science on a trip to Bell Laboratories when I was nine years old. He set an example of intelligence, kindness, and decency to which I aspire every day.
Primeras palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
On the day that he would first meet Thomas Edison, Paul watched a man burn alive in the sky above Broadway.
Citas
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
The Western Union man was attempting to untangle the two sets of wires. He looked like a child flummoxed by enormous shoelaces.
Paul felt not only that the lights were new, but that he was. A spark of the filament, and he had been revealed as something he never thought he might be.
None of these early iterations were fit for the home—no wife in America would sanction the installation of a lamp that was confusing to use, expensive to repair, and more likely than not to set the drapes on fire.
That spring, the light-bulb lawsuits descended like locusts upon the land.
"It's one thing to design something, kid. Thomas Edison designs all manner of junk. It's another thing entirely to design something that can be practically built. A thing that will work. That is what a real inventor does. He designs manufacturable devices."
He had no idea what he was to make of this mysterious Mr. Tesla. But any enemy of Edison's was bound to be a friend of Westinghouse's.
While Paul hoped that Westinghouse would not get impenetrably technical, any explanation he provided would still be more comprehensible than the buckshot of white chalk lines Tesla continued to spread across the blackboard.
Marguerite strained what looked to be every muscle upon her face to keep a smile in place.
Westinghouse seemed to think of himself as the father of a large clan of eager children; he would famously grace them with presents at holidays, and had in fact been the first employer in America to reduce his employees' workweek to six days.
Westinghouse found himself impotent in the face of Tesla's willful insubordination for the simple reason that he needed Tesla, while Tesla only found Westinghouse to be vaguely useful.
That attorneys labored with pens rather than shovels did not dignify their position in the eyes of Rockefellers and Morgans and Roosevelts. It only made their attempts at society life all the more quaint.
She was among the smallest women Paul had ever seen, but fit a double-sized personality into a squat bullet of a frame. She was a rifle shell. Hardened and cool, packed and loaded, ever ready to explode. How this mother had bred this daughter was a question for Mr. Darwin.
That she felt no need to prove anything to him, while he felt such desire to prove much to her, only accentuated the continent of social distance between them.
Even the alcohol in this place was the color of money.
"Nobody ever won a game they didn't play."
"You should share these devices with the world. Tell people what you're working on. Tell someone." ¶ "Am I not telling you, Mr. Paul Cravath?" ¶ "You are. But I'm not a scientist." ¶ "Perhaps that is the very reason I can be telling you," said Tesla with a smile. "You could not steal my ideas even if you wanted to." ¶ "I suppose that counts as trust in our business," said Paul.
Serrell raised an eyebrow. He was the sort of man who knew the communicative value of a carefully raised eyebrow.
To think of the scenes that took place nightly between those chairs. The backstabbing, the social climbing, the bitter family feuds played out at every intermission. The drama among the audience was famously more intense than what was performed upon the stage. Empty in the quiet morning, the house seemed pregnant with the promise of the night's warfare.
It occurred to Paul that he had met two very different Agnes Huntingtons, between her mother's house and the Players' Club. Would he find a third at the Metropolitan Opera?
Strange how this unaccountable man found himself so often in the lap of luxury.
"You don't trust me?" said Agnes. ¶ "I trust you a little," said Paul. "You're asking me to trust you a lot."
"Well, I'll tell you an awful secret about the opera," said Agnes as she rang the bell from a stagehand. "It's the same show every night."
The winter wind slapped hard against the thick windows, providing a low accompaniment to their quiet conversation.
"You're hallucinating, Nikola," said Paul. ¶ "No," replied Tesla with the first smile that Paul had seen on his face in a long time. "I'm inventing."
Paul brought mounds of paper into his firm's offices and stared at them as an experienced climber might regard the distant cliffs of Everest. What man could accomplish the trek alone?
Thomas Edison was not, Paul thought, the first man to become rich by inventing something clever. Rather, he was the first man to build a factory for harnessing cleverness. Eli Whitney and Alexander Graham Bell had each made his name by inventing one brilliant thing. Edison had formed a laboratory that had invented a system of invention.
Though Columbia was one of the oldest universities in the country, it still had its baby fat.
The notables of New York bounced against one another like the fizzy bubbles in the champagne flutes.
Money was a far more predictable motivator than legacy, or fame, or love, or whatever else might rouse a man from his bedsheets. An artist—or an inventor—was a far more dangerous partner than a businessman. The latter's betrayal could be planned for, even depended upon.
Paul felt suddenly naked, his thoughts and plans and seemingly clever moves over the past years now revealed to be but a pathetic sham. Edison had been outplaying them from the very start.
"Scientists. You ask one hundred of them a simple question, you get one hundred different answers. They're a necessary annoyance in the industrial business, I suppose."
"Poor people all think they deserve to be rich," he continued. "Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not." ¶ Morgan spoke as if they were the same class of men. As if Morgan were Paul's own reflection in a darkened mirror.
Just because a man is able to draw his line in the sand, it doesn’t mean he’ll know what to do when his only course of action requires crossing it.
If one has never suffered for want of a thing, one has no conception of the trade-offs required for getting it.
One doesn’t lie down with a lion and get to act surprised if one finds oneself devoured.
“Poor people all think they deserve to be rich,” he continued. “Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not.”
“The moment you stop bargaining is the last in which you’re ever given a thing.”
“‘General Electric.’ It has a rather nice ring to it, doesn’t it?”
Últimas palabras
Información procedente del conocimiento común inglés.Edita para encontrar en tu idioma.
He turned away, descending the stairwell into the darkening shadow of a country that was just becoming America.
Fiction.
Thriller.
Historical Fiction.
HTML:NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ? ??A world of invention and skulduggery, populated by the likes of Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla.???Erik Larson
??A model of superior historical fiction . . . an exciting, sometimes astonishing story.???The Washington Post From Graham Moore, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Imitation Game and New York Times bestselling author of The Sherlockian, comes a thrilling novel??based on actual events??about the nature of genius, the cost of ambition, and the battle to electrify America.
New York, 1888. Gas lamps still flicker in the city streets, but the miracle of electric light is in its infancy. The person who controls the means to turn night into day will make history??and a vast fortune. A young untested lawyer named Paul Cravath, fresh out of Columbia Law School, takes a case that seems impossible to win. Paul??s client, George Westinghouse, has been sued by Thomas Edison over a billion-dollar question: Who invented the light bulb and holds the right to power the country?
The case affords Paul entry to the heady world of high society??the glittering parties in Gramercy Park mansions, and the more insidious dealings done behind closed doors. The task facing him is beyond daunting. Edison is a wily, dangerous opponent with vast resources at his disposal??private spies, newspapers in his pocket, and the backing of J. P. Morgan himself. Yet this unknown lawyer shares with his famous adversary a compulsion to win at all costs. How will he do it?
In obsessive pursuit of victory, Paul crosses paths with Nikola Tesla, an eccentric, brilliant inventor who may hold the key to defeating Edison, and with Agnes Huntington, a beautiful opera singer who proves to be a flawless performer on stage and off. As Paul takes greater and greater risks, he??ll find that everyone in his path is playing their own game, and no one is quite who they seem.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
??A satisfying romp . . . Takes place against a backdrop rich with period detail . . . Works wonderfully as an entertainment . . . As it charges forward, the novel leaves no dot unconnected.???Noah
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