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The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America | 
 enlarge | Author: Maury Klein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $13.79
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Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 236606
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 560
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.2
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.8
ISBN: 1596914122
Dewey Decimal Number: 609.73
EAN: 9781596914124
ASIN: 1596914122
Publication Date: May 27, 2008
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Product Description
The dramatic story of the “power revolution” that turned America from an agrarian society into a technological superpower, and the dynamic, fiercely competitive inventors and entrepreneurs who made it happen—a riveting historical saga to rival McCullough’s The Great Bridge or Larson’s Thunderstruck.
Maury Klein, author of Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929, is one of America’s most acclaimed historians of business and industry. In The Power Makers, he offers an epic narrative of his greatest subject yet—the “power revolution” that transformed American life in the course of the nineteenth century.
The steam engine, the incandescent bulb, the electric motor—inventions 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 Makers is a dazzling saga of inspired invention, dogged persistence, and business competition at its most naked and cutthroat—a tale of America in its most astonishing decades.
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| Customer Reviews:
A good history with shaky technology writing July 21, 2008
Joel M. Kauffman (Wayne, PA United States)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
A historian of business and society, Professor Klein's has written well on these two topics, an inspiration for techies like me, bringing back the pride I felt in the 1950s in reading biographies of inventors and scientists, and building electromechanical gadgets. A background frame of reference is provided based on a very young man attending the US centennial exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, where a huge Corliss steam engine was the star, and powered many other machines. Electrical exhibits were little more than scientific curiosities. Later the same man attended the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Here a hundred thousand light bulbs and hundreds of arc lights and dozens of machines were powered by electric generators or alternators, themselves powered by steam engines very much in the background. Finally the same man, quite old, attended the 1939 World's Fair in Queens, NYC. Now electricity was a given, and new appliances, radio, and even early TV as well as fluorescent lights were on display. The new star was the internal combustion engine. Cars had changed the landscape and were promoted as most desirable possessions for an unlimited future. Steam trains still ruled, but electric light rail, subway and elevated lines made densely populated cities livable.
Steam engines are shown be have been empirical creations of tinkers, basically. Newcomen, Watt, Evans, Fitch, Rumsey, Trevithick, Fulton and many others are described. Personalities, business tribulations and/or success, acceptance of inventions, and patent fights are all there. These aspects were very well done. Later the move to steam turbines for more thermal efficiency appears.
Early work on electricity that will remind you of grade school physics and chemistry courses comes next. Galvani, Volta, Ampere, Joule, Rumford, Carnot, Clausius, Faraday and others are well described. Then the applications guys -- Edison, Westinghouse, Tesla, Steinmetz, Thomson and dozens of others are portrayed well. Here, too, the battles over patents that consumed so much effort and time received proper attention. Formation of General Electric around 1892 from Thomson-Houston and several other companies, especially Edison Electric is described, with smaller Westinghouse as the only significant independent for generators, alternators, motors, power stations, lighting and all. The battle of the currents, direct (Edison) and alternating (Westinghouse), gets the attention it deserves, including Edison's provision of alternating current for the first executions by electricity, and his vicious coinage of the term "Westinghoused". The adoption of 60-hertz frequency for alternating current and the voltages we have known all our lives has a history also.
Finally the slow rise from about 1890 and sudden fall around 1930 of Samuel Insull, formerly an assistant to Edison, is shown. Here and elsewhere, the takeover by financial tycoons or bankers of companies already proven successful is described. Insull's little known contribution was working out how the electric utilities of today would operate to best advantage all around, as local monopolies under government regulation, allowing the economies of scale to be a benefit to all. Insull was among the first to realize that evenness of load was so important because, then as now, it is so hard to store huge amounts of electricity.
Prof. Klein's writing is excellent in style and readability. There is very extensive referencing and an index, 16 photos, and some simple circuit diagrams from about 1885. More would have been very welcome, especially in explaining how 3-phase alternating current works. He has carefully avoided any present day political views about power and its makers or detractors. He has pulled together a story with more threads than a Persian rug. So why not 5-stars?
While Prof. Klein realized that some description of steam engines and of all aspects of current electricity were needed to give the reader any understanding of what was accomplished, his efforts in this important area were less than perfect. The same with business terms. Some examples are given below. For a list of all 35, e-mail me at kauffman37@yahoo.com.
1. On p15: "The Newcomen engine first heated the water in the cylinder..." The photo shows that water was heated in a boiler, and that steam entered the cylinder. The expression: "...create the vacuum to lift the beam..." is an obsolete description long replaced by: "air pressure pushed the piston down, lifting the beam". The errors were repeated on p21.
2. On p23 and elsewhere the advantage of one of Watt's inventions for the steam engine, the condenser, is not well explained, nor the air pump used with it. Since it appears that steam engines for railroads did not have condensers, I do not understand why it was so important for stationary ones.
3. On p45 and elsewhere, the term "tube boiler" was used without clarity on whether it was a fire tube or water tube type, these being quite different.
4. On p60 the fire tube boiler was said to have become the standard, but other sources say that the water tube type became standard. On p67 Prof. Klein wrote that this happened by 1876.
5. Also on p60, the Westinghouse air brake was said to stop a train by use of compressed air. This is not a good explanation; springs stop the train when the compressed air is released. And p193 was no help either.
6. On p64, anthracite coal was said to be almost pure carbon. But my 1953-4 CRC Handbook has 83% as the highest carbon content for any coal, far from almost pure.
Interesting book June 20, 2008
Samuel Dachs (Seattle, WA USA)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
A very interesting book, well written and obviously well researched---in some instances a bit too detailed but
I am not an engineer and someone with more training, might find the detail worthwhile---
History Does Rhyme June 11, 2008
Steve Booth-Butterfield (Morgantown, WV USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
The value of this book shows most clearly in Chapter 13, Competition and Electrocution. An enterprising screenplay writer could develop a script that would rival, "There Will Be Blood." We see the clash in Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, capital punishment, a commodity speculator names Hyacinthe Secretan, an obscure engineer named Harold Brown, and all the forces of growth in modern society colliding in New York City at the turn of the 19th century. Reading that chapter made me think about how little things have changed in society over the past 100 years and that we're still living in the Modern World after all.
Professor Klein takes a detailed (and at times a painstakingly detailed) look at the people and ideas that led to the invention and distribution of energy and power in America from roughly 1880 through 1930. The first half of the book is a slow read. It traces the biography of key people (James Watt, for example) and ideas (the steam engine) in a fairly straightforward, linear narrative. It is a long setup, but the back half of the book pays it all off as Klein then begins to weave a broader narrative of social forces (politics, economics, journalism, and those great characters with American grit, ambition, and craziness) with these key people and ideas.
It's hard not to see this same kind of script playing out in America (and the rest of the world through globalization) with new techologies like computers. In many ways the world is not PostModern, but still in a Modern phase as we learn how to integrate new techologies into normal human society. It's just hilarious to read about politicians and journalists howling about capital punishment (yes), greed, science, and virtue from 1880. It's like reading the New York Times today. Just change the names and you've got the same kinds of challenges, problems, and questions.
A fascinating book that requires a little commitment through the early chapters.
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