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Cargando... Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World (2003)por Jill Jonnes
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. Extremely interesting story of how electricity came to power the machinery of America and how AC power became the main thing over DC power. Also includes the stories of Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla, three important figures involved with electricity. Highly recommended ! ( ) If you are looking for a highly technical book then this one isn't for you, the book is more about the business and people that made electricity possible today than about explaining how the science works, and that's fine, it was what I was looking for right now, though it wouldn't have hurt a bit more of explanation. A fascinating account of the war of electrical currents. Split into ten chapters, the book talks about Edison developing the light bulb and focusing on DC, Tesla being a genius and far ahead of his time, and Westinghouse being a businessman from Pittsburgh with a background dealing with machines. The major arguments against AC were the dangers of the current, and that nothing used AC. No one could figure out how to produce AC current without brush contacts. However, DC had its own issues with the limits how far the current could travel. A generator would have to be built in each building and only had an effective distance of around half a mile or so. So Edison and his group focused on Safety, while Tesla and Westinghouse used AC since it was more economical. So AC wins out in the end, but the journey there involved a ton of interesting stories. Like the first Public Execution with Electricity, or how some fellow named Harold Brown used AC to torture animals in order to prove that it was dangerous. Fascinating account of the travails of bringing electricity into modern life. Thomas Edison, the legendarily stubborn folksy inventor, Nikola Tesla, the true electrical genius, and George Westinghouse, the far sighted business mogul, all dreamed of spreading the power of electricity throughout the world. Highlights include the bank runs of 1894, Chicago World's Fair, Niagara Falls and the financial panic of 1907. The outcome of the competition between direct & indirect current systems is now taken for granted but vital at the time. All the original characters eventually lost control of their business to financial backers. The book was published in 2003 but somehow strangely current with this 1894 quote "many Americans had come to view the notion as a struggle for it's very being, putting the rich against the ordinary folk". The comprehensive approach to the subject provides a more satisfying approach to US History the lists of battles and politicians. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
Distinciones
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. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)621.309Technology Engineering and allied operations Applied physics Electrical, magnetic, optical, communications, computer engineering; electronics, lighting Electric power plant Biography; History By PlaceClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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