InThe Power Makers, one of America's most acclaimed historians of business and society offers an epic narrative of his greatest subject yetthe "power revolution" that transformed American life in the course of the nineteenth century.With consummate skill, Klein recreates the discoveries, the stunning triumphs and frequent failures, and the unceasing battles in the marketplace.The Power Makersis a dazzling saga of inspired invention, dogged persistence, and business rivalry at its most naked and cutthroata tale of America in its most astonishing decades. Maury Kleinis the author of many books, includingThe Life and Legend of Jay Gould,Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War, andRainbow's End: The Crash of 1929. He is professor emeritus at the University of Rhode Island. Maury Klein is one of America's most acclaimed historians of business and industry. InThe Power Makers, he offers an epic narrative of his greatest subject yetthe "power revolution" that transformed American life in the course of the nineteenth century and that turned America from an agrarian society into a technological superpower. The steam engine, the incandescent bulb, the electric motorinventions such as these replaced backbreaking toil with machine labor and changed every aspect of daily life in the span of a few generations.
The power revolution is not a tale of machines, however, but of men: inventors such as James Watt, Elihu Thomson, and Nikola Tesla; entrepreneurs such as George Westinghouse; savvy businessmen such as J.P. Morgan, Samuel Insull, and Charles Coffin of General Electric. Striding among them like a colossus is the figure of Thomas Edison, who was creative genius and business visionary at once. With consummate skill, Klein recreates their discoveries, their stunning triumphs and frequent failures, and their unceasing, tumultuous, and ferocious battles in the marketplace. In Klein's hands, their personalities and discoveries leap off the page.The Power Makersis a saga of inspired invention, dogged persistence, and business competition at its most naked and cutthroata tale of America in its most astonishing decades. "The Power Makersis at once grandiloquent and granular.
At technical descriptions, Klein excels. In explaining a disadvantage of Edison's direct currentthe greater the current, the bigger the wire needed to conduct ithe offers this nifty illustration: 'to light Fifth Avenue from Fourteenth to Fifty-ninth Street, the conductors would have to be as large as a man's leg.' If you haven't given Boyle's law much thought since the Reagan revolution, reading Klein will reward you with an excellent course in heat, electricity, and magnetism, at very little cost to your composure."Jill Lepore,The New Yorker"Maury's Klein'sThe Power Makersallows us to step back and remind ourselvesand wedoneed remindingthat the past two centuries have been a period of extraordinary invention . Fascinating."William Tucker,Wall Street Journal "Klein's book reads like a fairy tale . Klein himself rarely fails to reach for the full significance of events. ('Every material achievement that would characterize civilization during the next two centuries began with the possibilities opened by the steam engine,' he writes of James Watt's invention.
)The Power Makersis at once grandiloquent and granular. At technical descriptions,.