Something that everyone takes for granted, electricity, has a very interesting history. The book, AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War, by Tom McNichol, does a very nice job of giving the reader an overview of the early days of electrical power generation. I say "overview" because at 190 pages, there isn't a lot of room for an exhaustively researched subject. But for what McNichol does, he does it quite well.

Contents:
Prologue: Negative and Positive
Chapter 1: First Sparks
Chapter 2: Lightening in a Bottle
Chapter 3: Enter the Wizard
Chapter 4: Let There Be Light
Chapter 5: Electrifying the Big Apple
Chapter 6: Tesla
Chapter 7: The Animal Experiments
Chapter 8: Old Sparky
Chapter 9: Pulse of the World
Chapter 10: Killing an Elephant
Chapter 11: Twilight by Battery Power
Chapter 12: DC's Revenge
Epilogue: Standards Wars: Past, Present, and Future
Further Reading in Electricity

Picture a world without electricity. Hard to do, isn't it? Everything we use consumes electricity. But there was a time when there was no electricity. But as some people began to study it, there arose two competing men, who would fight to have their standard be the one that delivered power to the masses. The great inventor, Thomas Edison backed DC. An industrial titan, George Westinghouse, and a very eccentric inventor, Nikola Tesla, backed AC. Each man, Edison and Westinghouse, had factories churning out parts for their standard. They employed any means possible to get the public to back their method of electrical distribution. Edison, for his part, developed (or perfected) the electric chair, using AC, to show that it kills. McNichol gives you a couple of chapters on the electrocution of animals and humans, which were unnerving.

You might think that a subject like electricity would be boring, but McNichol focuses primarily on the central characters. There is little technical information, so the novel moves quickly. The personalities of the men, Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse, are brought to life and help the reader to understand why Edison lost the war (mainly stubbornness and a lack of vision as to customer needs and wants) and how Westinghouse and Tesla were able to win (Westinghouse could anticipate some needs, and Tesla - well, he was a person unto himself). One of the most interesting facts is the distances electricity could travel using AC or DC. AC could span great distances, a fact that was not lost on Westinghouse. In fact, a power plant that he built to light Telluride, CO, is still working as is the one at Niagara Falls, NY (which supplies New York and Buffalo with power).

This is a great read for those looking for an overview of early days of electricity, electrical distribution, and a fierce standards war. McNichols' Epilogue tells a tale of VHS versus Betamax and Blu-Ray versus HD-DVD. But the lessons in the book could equally be applied to OOXML and other tech standards wars.

What a fascinating study concerning a facet of our everyday life that we assume we've always had at our beckoned call! Who would have thought that Edison would have gone too such lengths to maintain that direct current was the safest,cheapest, and most efficient method of conveying electricity to the populace. It only goes to prove that even the greatest among us have flaws that overshadow their thinking when blindly following an indefensible theory or ideal. We owe a debt of graditude to Mr.McNichol
for taking our hand and leading us through the murky waters of what could have been a complex and somewhat difficult concept for the average layman unschooled in the underlying principles of electrical energy.

AC/DC, subtitled The Savage Tale of the First Standards War, is a quick read that does a pretty good job telling the PR and human side of the AC/DC story, but skimps badly on technical issues related to the AC/DC battle. This book is less than half the length of the much better book on the same topic, Empires of Light --- Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, by Jill Jonnes (2003).

McNichols has two chapters on the bizarre electrocutions of animals and prisoners with details of every voltage used and electrode placement. But on a key technical point, getting Tesla's induction motor to actually work outside the laboratory, McNichols says next to nothing. The fact is that even though Westinghouse had bought the patent rights to Tesla's AC induction motor, Tesla's AC motor would not run on Westinghouse's early AC power. In the lab Tesla was running his motor on a polyphase AC generator that he had designed. McNichol says (page 83), "Tesla moved to Pittsburgh ... adapting the Tesla motor to the Westinghouse system". McNichols has got it backwards.

Tesla in Pittsburgh probably did teach Westinghouse's engineers about his AC induction motor, but the important point historically and relevant to today is that Tesla worked to get Westinghouse to redesign his power plants and distribution systems so that the AC induction motor would start and run well. This required lowering the AC frequency from 133 hz to 60 hz and changing from single phase to three phase power. The latter meaning the distribution wiring had to change, going from two wires to three wires.

The reason that Tesla's induction motor needed three phase AC is that it worked by establishing a smoothly rotating magnetic field that dragged the shorted rotor around with it. You can't do this with single phase AC power. The frequency change (133 hz to 60 hz) was because an induction motor is essentially controlled by the frequency of AC power and 133 hz caused the motor to run too fast and (very likely) not start well.

On the most important technical issue in the AC/DC battle, how far power could be sent, McNichols makes no attempt to explain how AC can be sent further than DC. The key is the way transformers work. While AC does not flow as easily in wire as DC due to inductance, this disadvantage is more than overcome by the fact that effective length of the wiring can be reduced by the square of the voltage increase. For example, distributing AC at 3,000 V vs 100V for DC makes the wire length look shorter by a factor of 30 squared, which is 900! This is a huge advantage for AC.

I am not a technical person in any way but I found myself drawn to this story and found it hard to put down. Tom McNichol took subject matter that could have been delivered in a dry or complicated way and not only simplified it, but injected it with real drama and intrigue. I was both amused and horrified by the tales highlighting the standards war between the Edison and Westinghouse companies. This book proved both a compelling historical piece and a provocative cautionary tale.