Simply Electrifying: The Technology that Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk by Craig R. Roach (PDF)

Description

Imagine your life without the internet. Without phones. Without television. Without sprawling cities. Without the freedom to continue working and playing after the sun goes down.Electricity is at the core of all modern life. It has transformed our society more than any other technology. Yet, no book offers a comprehensive history about this technological marvel.Until now.Simply Electrifying: The Technology that Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world: Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Elon Musk, and more. In the process, it reveals for the first time the complete, thrilling, and often-dangerous story of electricity’s historic discovery, development, and worldwide application.Electricity plays a fundamental role not only in our everyday lives but in history’s most pivotal events, from global climate change and the push for wind- and solar-generated electricity to Japan’s nuclear accident at Fukushima and Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.Written by electricity expert and four-decade veteran of the industry Craig R. Roach, Simply Electrifying marshals, in fascinating narrative detail, the full range of factors that shaped the electricity business over time—science, technology, law, politics, government regulation, economics, business strategy, and culture—before looking forward toward the exhilarating prospects for electricity generation and use that will shape our future.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Great history of a force we take for granted. This book is a great read with interesting stories on how electricity started and developed in the U.S. It ranges from economics to culture and includes really cool stories on major historical figures. I preferred the 2nd half of the book, especially reading about FDR, John Lewis, Rickover, and Rachel Carson. Definitely worth a read!

⭐Clearly written description of the emergence of electricity, with description of the convergence and inter-dependencies of of people, conditions and events needed for it all to have happen in such a blessed fashion for the benefit of our civilization.

⭐i found the history of electricity fascinating. Dr Roach wrote an extremely readable account of the men andmethods that made electricity the greatest invention ever. Where would we be without it..!!Simply Electrifying isnt only a history, but it ties our past together in order to inform the reader what the future may hold.

⭐The history, culture, heroes, and economic impact of electricity are fascinating. The science of electricity — from Franklin’s kite to atomic energy to Musk’s Mars adventure — is explained so that a layperson can understand and appreciate its significance. Great read. Great holiday present.

⭐Early inventions get you off the ground with interest. Eventually, while still providing information, the payoff gets weaker and weaker as invention is sublimated by endless painful minutia.

⭐According to the forward, Craig R. Roach spent ten years on this book, and it is easy to see why. It is about as comprehensive a look at the way electricity has been integrated into modern society as you will ever read. In the end, the book was not exactly what I was expecting, but it was, with some exceptions, worth the read.=== The Good Stuff ===* The book is well written. Roach writes in an easy-to-read style, and mostly keeps the topic moving along without getting bogged down in endless detail. The writing is lively, avoids the long paragraphs and arcane vocabulary of the “serious academic”, and communicates its points reasonably well.* I will admit that the electric industry in the US is not one of my strong points, but there was a lot of information in the book that I had never come across before, and is relevant to our current and increasing reliance on electric power generation and distribution. For example, Roach points out how electric power generation is a business that relies on large economies-of-scale, and it is impossible to electrify large portions of a country without a large market. But there is always a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem- who buys appliances until the electric lines are in? And who would run electric lines to a house without appliances?* Much of the book concentrates on the government stimulation and regulation of the electric power industry, and its close cousin, the telecommunications industry. Electric utilities are “natural monopolies”, at least in their traditional form—meaning it simply doesn’t make economic sense to have more than one covering any given area. Roach examines how this fact affected the early growth of the utilities, and how the early monopolies were controlled and in many cases, morphed into modern utilities.=== The Not-So-Good Stuff ===* While the regulation side of the electric business was interesting, the discussion tended to get a bit long-winded and overblown. I’ll admit that as an engineer, my interests are more drawn to the technical side of the business, but the book seems to overly concentrate on the regulatory and financial aspects. As an example, the Tennessee Valley Authority was responsible for some incredible engineering and technical accomplishments, but most of the discussion of this organization involved legislative and rate-related items.* Especially as the book progressed, the technical details became less and less defined and explained. One small example, in the discussion of nuclear power, the author mentions the “ceiling” on the economies-of-scale of nuclear power plants. Nuclear power certainly has its issues, but as a large fixed-cost technology, I had never heard of such ceilings, and it would have been nice to have the author explain his thoughts.=== Summary ===The book is much more about the electric power industry than it is about electricity. There is some content in the beginning of the book on the contributions of Ben Franklin and other scientists, but 80% of the book is about how electric utilities are regulated, controlled, stimulated and influenced. There is plenty of interesting information on how utilities formed in the US, and how their financial structure worked to allow them to put large investments in place. If you are interested in that, you will enjoy the book.=== Disclaimer ===I was able to read an advance copy through the courtesy of the publisher and NetGalley.

⭐This book’s title/subtitle really caught my attention. To me, it seemed like a sweeping account of the evolution of the science and particularly the technology that ultimately brings electricity to our homes. In the first 100 pages or so, that was certainly true as the author discusses the contributions of Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday and others, culminating with Edison, Westinghouse and Tesla. But then, the author took a turn and began discussing the business/economics aspects, e.g., stocks, companies, investments, mergers, related politics, etc., etc. – topics that are mostly not very interesting to me. But eventually the author reverted back towards technology, but then back to business and back again. He also discusses the birth and evolution of the environmental movement and its effects on electricity generation. He even includes an entire chapter discussing Einstein’s five groundbreaking 1905 papers as well as a brief summary of Einstein and Infield’s book “The Evolution of Physics” – all this, I presume, to arrive at Einstein’s famous mass-energy equivalence relation. Finally, and unfortunately, the book contains no figures or pictures or diagrams of any kind.Overall, I found that the author covered a lot of ground here, but too much of it is unrelated to the book’s subtitle as I perceived it – and some of the material (the high-end business/political/economical aspects) I found rather boring. Nevertheless, I did enjoy the technical/scientific parts of the book enough, overall, to give it the above rating.

⭐I was a fan of Marshall McLuhan cultural mysteries when I was young. Yoking myself to doom attitudes as the evil genius joke that makes America shift the world to hack horse feathers, episodes of crazy impossibilities reaching demotic defeat helped me live through Vietnam, Cambodia, Watergate, sexual experimentation with a large female anaconda for dead elephant upchuck, and the creepy jackalope eye of pathetic dangling supersuckers. I could feel Jesus and his lawyer coming back on cosmic wavelengths for heathens of hoydenism and cops chasing a bitch that rhymes with rich. The glory of great fantasies and debt trillions give moon sheep universal space.Electricity provides new crimes against humor as the conformity of Jesus shaves people combines ringing up the gonads and bringing in the sheaves.

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