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. Empires of Light is the gripping history of electricity, the “mysterious fluid,” and how the fateful collision of Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse left the world utterly transformed.

    Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon, but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; U-2 pilot Gary Francis Powers; Grace Metalious, who wrote Peyton Place; and "Goody" Pincus, who led the team that invented the Pill.A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

    Sarnoff was convinced that Armstrong’s inventions had the power to change the way societies communicated with each other forever. He would become a visionary captain of the media industry, even predicting the advent of the Internet. In the mid-1930s, however, when Armstrong suspected Sarnoff of orchestrating a cadre of government officials to seize control of the FM airwaves, he committed suicide. Sarnoff had a very different view of who his friend’s enemies were. Many corrupt politicians and corporations saw in Armstrong’s inventions the opportunity to commodify our most ubiquitous natural resource—the air. This early alliance between high tech and business set the precedent for countless legal and industrial battles over broadband and licensing bandwidth, many of which continue to influence policy and debate today.

    Based on original material and previously unavailable documents, this acclaimed book is the definitive biography of the man considered by many to be the founding father of modern electrical technology. Among Tesla's creations were the channeling of alternating current, fluorescent and neon lighting, wireless telegraphy, and the giant turbines that harnessed the power of Niagara Falls.

    It is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad—the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and sometimes lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks.The U.S. government pitted two companies—the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads—against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomotives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes vibrantly to life.

    Who knew that he also was a pivotal figure in the development of the airplane, the hydrofoil, genetic engineering, and more? Charlotte Gray does, and she tells us how and why she brought to life the passionate mind and heart of the man behind so many amazing ideas and innovations. --Lauren Nemroff Some Questions for Charlotte Gray [image] 1. Most people picture Alexander Graham Bell as that grandfatherly looking man with a long white beard who invented the telephone. What's wrong with that image? The image of Alexander Graham Bell as a kindly Santa Claus figure is the one we all know: It is as familiar as the one of Einstein with his hair in a frizzy grey mass. But when Alexander Graham Bell was struggling to invent the telephone, he was a skinny, clean-shaven, neurotically intense young man and a hypochondriac, with obsessive work habits and a very volatile nature. Reading his letters and journals, I was shocked to discover how often he would ricochet between euphoria and depression. Invention was Alexander Graham Bell's passion, but I frequently wondered whether, if he had not had an early success and the right wife, his difficult personality would have prevented him achieving anything. I think it is important to revise the grandfatherly stereotype of Bell in order to show that invention is difficult, and inventors are not easy, placid people to live with. 2. In what way does Bell's genius different from other inventors of his age, such as Thomas Edison or the Wright brothers? The wonderful thing about the inventions of such nineteenth century giants as Bell, Edison and the Wright brothers is that, with a little bit of effort, even those of us who never did Grade 12 physics can actually understand how their inventions worked. One could never say that about today's microelectronic technology. Intuition and imagination were all crucial for the breakthroughs made by Edison, the Wright brothers and Bell. However, what sets Bell apart from Edison and the Wright brothers was that he didn't have an entrepreneurial bone in his body. He was more like a holdover from the eighteenth century Enlightenment, while the others were go-getting twentieth-century hustlers. Edison was always looking for financial backers; he announced his breakthroughs before he had even built working prototypes; he was one of the first inventors to put together a real R and D team at a purpose-built laboratory, at Menlo Park. He understood that invention is, in his own words, "One percent inspiration, ninety percent perspiration." Similarly the Wright Brothers were eager to make money out of their flying machines. They refused to share their technological breakthroughs, guarded their patents fiercely, and wouldn't give any demonstrations to the public of their biplanes. Bell was the opposite--totally absorbed in extending the frontiers of knowledge, and completely careless about commercial exploitation of his ideas. 3. Is it true that "necessity is the mother of invention" or is it something else? Invention has many mothers - the right materials, a widespread understanding that this will improve the world in some way, the right individual to pursue the elusive dream. In the case of the telephone, one can argue that there was no overwhelming necessity for a new form of communication: the telegraph had been working well for 30 years, and only a few people realized that a device that could carry the human voice, rather than the Morse code, would pull people together in a revolutionary way. As soon as telephones appeared in the market, their advantages were obvious. But there was still incredible resistance. In Britain, the upper classes were slow to acquire telephones because they posed a class issue: who should answer them? Everybody knew that, in a house with servants, the servant answered the door when the telegraph boy rang the bell. But should master or servant speak on the phone? The democratic nature of the telephone--anybody could use it, not just qualified operators--also shackled its spread. In Russia after the revolution, Stalin is said to have vetoed the idea of a modern telephone system. "It will unmake our work," the dictator decreed. "No greater instrument for counter-revolution and conspiracy can be imagined." So did necessity drive the invention of the telephone? No--when Bell first started speculating on its impact, people thought he was mad. But it quickly became a total necessity…imagine life without electronic communication today! 4. It was amazing to learn that Bell's mother and his wife were both deaf, and that from an early age he was immersed in research on the nature of sound and oral communication. How important were these personal relationships in shaping his outlook and inventions? One of my greatest surprises when I started research for Reluctant Genius was the discovery that Bell's first ambition was to be a teacher of the deaf, and that he remained committed to the cause of improved education for the hearing impaired throughout his life. I had no idea of this side of him, or of his long relationship with Helen Keller. The fact that the two most important women in his life, his mother and his wife, were deaf was of crucial importance both to his own work, and to his attitude to others. His respect for their intelligences and personalities meant that, unlike many of his contemporaries, he never assumed that deafness was linked to intellectual disability. Moreover, his scientific interest in their condition informed his telephone research. Because he knew why their ears didn't work, he understood how sound should reach the brain in a hearing person's ear, through the ear drum. None of his competitors made that intuitive leap. Their early attempts to build working telephones were foiled because they didn't include the diaphragm that mimicked the action of the ear drum, and which was the key feature of Bell's first phone. Lastly, Bell was also fascinated by the intergenerational transmission of deafness. This led to his research on genetics in general - and the program he initiated at his summer home, in Cape Breton, to breed a flock of "super sheep" that would always have twin births. 5. Bell's wife, Mabel Hubbard Bell, was a remarkable person in her own right. Why was it so important to tell her story? Too often, biographies of "Great Men" suggest they achieved everything by their own efforts. A few did, of course, but most depended on the support and encouragement of others--parents, partners, associates--to provide the right environment in which they could achieve their goals. Behind every great man….This was the case with Alexander Graham Bell. He would always have had his "Eureka Moment", in the summer of 1874, when he realized how a "talking telegraph" might work. But without Mabel, we probably would never have heard of him. He would not have patented the invention or found the business partners who helped him moved his invention from the laboratory to the market place. Mabel's father, Gardiner Hubbard, was his patent lawyer: Mabel herself ensured that he went to the Philadelphia Exposition, in 1876, to demonstrate his new apparatus. In later years, Mabel provided all kinds of other practical help, in ensuring that her exasperating husband could focus on his inventions. She handled the financial side of their marriage: she found qualified young men who could help him work on his flying machines: she was always cheering him up and stroking his ego when he got depressed. And she created, along with their two daughters, a warm family environment which gave balance to Bell's life - and which so many of his contemporaries, including Thomas Edison, never enjoyed. I was determined to give Mabel her due in the story of Bell. I found her such an attractive and intriguing figure. She was stone deaf, ten years younger than her husband, and their relationship began as a teacher-student one. It would be easy to assume that this brilliant, world famous man would be the dominant figure in the relationship. In fact, the reverse is true. 6. What do you think Bell would think of cell phones, the internet and other wireless means of communication? Bell himself anticipated "electric communication": he was very frustrated by how long it took for a letter from Nova Scotia to reach Europe. I'm sure he would be delighted by the internet. However, he would be appalled by the constant buzz of other technological advances, and the way we've allowed them to trump all other forms of human intercourse. This is a man who wouldn't have a telephone in his own study, because its ring would disturb his train of thought. He was a gracious, well-mannered man who would have been horrified by the way many of us let our cell phones to interrupt our face-to-face conversations. And if somebody pulled out a Blackberry and started punching into it while Bell was speaking of him--well, Alec would have muttered, "Shee-e-esh" (the nearest he ever got to swearing) and stomped out of the room. 7. What was the most exciting research discovery that you made? As a biographer, I have to say that my most exciting discovery was the wealth of material I had to work with. Because Alexander Graham Bell could never speak to his wife on the telephone, he and Mabel exchanged long, intimate, colourful letters whenever they were apart--and that was often. I was thrilled to discover, at the Alexander Graham Bell Historic Site in Baddeck, Nova Scotia, 180 three-ring binders of family correspondence (another set is housed at the Library of Congress, Washington.) These letters let me explore the inner-workings of the mind of a genius, and of a remarkable marriage, in a way that I had hardly dared hope for. I was also amazed at the range of Bell's activities. The telephone, the photophone (which sent sounds down beams of light), an early iron lung, a desalination process for salt water, flying machines, hydrofoils, genetic experiments…his scientific interests were enormously varied. And at the same time, he was doing so much else, for example with the Smithsonian Institute, and the National Geographic Society. And throughout his career, there was his long-running commitment to deaf education. It was hard not to be overwhelmed! 8. What are you working on right now? Yes, I'm already launched on my next biography. (In fact, I find it very hard not to start my next book before the previous one is even in the stores--I have a psychological need to live both my own life and someone else's!) My next project is a short biography of Nellie McClung, the Canadian author and political activist.

    Then he wrote a groundbreaking operating system and distributed it via the Internet -- for free. Today Torvalds is an international folk hero. And his creation LINUX is used by over 12 million people as well as by companies such as IBM.Now, in a narrative that zips along with the speed of e-mail, Torvalds gives a history of his renegade software while candidly revealing the quirky mind of a genius. The result is an engrossing portrayal of a man with a revolutionary vision, who challenges our values and may change our world.

    Featuring a mosaic of memories from politicians, businessmen, artists, and writers, from those who were just kids to those who remember losing a fortune, Hard Times is not only a gold mine of information but a fascinating interplay of memory and fact, revealing how the Depression affected the lives of those who experienced it firsthand.

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    But radio came roaring back with a whole new concept. The war was over, the baby boom was on, the country was in clover, and a bold new beat was giving the syrupy songs of yesteryear a run for their money. Add transistors, 45 rpm records, and a young man named Elvis to the mix, and the result was the perfect storm that rocked, rolled, and reinvented radio.Visionary entrepreneurs like Todd Storz pioneered the Top 40 concept, which united a generation. But it took trendsetting “disc jockeys” like Alan Freed, Murray the K, Wolfman Jack, Cousin Brucie, and their fast-talking, too-cool-for-school counterparts across the land to turn time, temperature, and the same irresistible hit tunes played again and again into the ubiquitous sound track of the fifties and sixties. The Top 40 sound broke through racial barriers, galvanized coming-of-age kids (and scandalized their perplexed parents), and provided the insistent, inescapable backbeat for times that were a-changin’.Along with rock-and-roll music came the attitude that would literally change the “voice” of radio forever, via the likes of raconteur Jean Shepherd, who captivated his loyal following of “Night People”; the inimitable Bob Fass, whose groundbreaking Radio Unnameable inaugurated the anything-goes free-form style that would come to define the alternative frontier of FM; and a small-time Top 40 deejay who would ultimately find national fame as a political talk-show host named Rush Limbaugh.From Hunter Hancock, who pushed beyond the limits of 1950s racial segregation with rhythm and blues and hepcat patter, to Howard Stern, who blew through all the limits with a blue streak of outrageous on-air antics; from the heyday of summer songs that united carefree listeners to the latter days of political talk that divides contentious callers; from the haze of classic rock to the latest craze in hip-hop, Something in the Air chronicles the extraordinary evolution of the unique and timeless medium that captured our hearts and minds, shook up our souls, tuned in–and turned on–our consciousness, and went from being written off to rewriting the rules of pop culture.

    state of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets.Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained.

    His invention of the first practical incandescent lamp 140 years ago so dazzled the world--already reeling from his invention of the phonograph and dozens of other revolutionary devices--that it cast a shadow over his later achievements. In all, this near-deaf genius ("I haven't heard a bird sing since I was twelve years old") patented 1,093 inventions, not including others, such as the X-ray fluoroscope, that he left unlicensed for the benefit of medicine.One of the achievements of this staggering new biography, the first major life of Edison in more than twenty years, is that it portrays the unknown Edison--the philosopher, the futurist, the chemist, the botanist, the wartime defense adviser, the founder of nearly 250 companies--as fully as it deconstructs the Edison of mythological memory. Edmund Morris, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, brings to the task all the interpretive acuity and literary elegance that distinguished his previous biographies of Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Ludwig van Beethoven. A trained musician, Morris is especially well equipped to recount Edison's fifty-year obsession with recording technology and his pioneering advances in the synchronization of movies and sound. Morris sweeps aside conspiratorial theories positing an enmity between Edison and Nikola Tesla and presents proof of their mutually admiring, if wary, relationship.Enlightened by seven years of research among the five million pages of original documents preserved in Edison's huge laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey, and privileged access to family papers still held in trust, Morris is also able to bring his subject to life on the page--the adored yet autocratic and often neglectful husband of two wives and father of six children. If the great man who emerges from it is less a sentimental hero than an overwhelming force of nature, driven onward by compulsive creativity, then Edison is at last getting his biographical due.

    G. Lord was becoming a teenager in Southern California and her mother was dying of cancer, Lord's father-an archetypal, remote, rocket engineer- disappeared into his work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, building the space probes of the Mariner Mars 69 mission. Thirty years later, Lord found herself reporting on the JPL, triggering childhood memories and a desire to revisit her past as a way of understanding the ethos of rocket science. Astro Turf is the brilliant result of her journey of discovery.Remembering her pain at her father's absence, yet intrigued by what he did, Lord captures him on the page as she recalls her own youthful, eccentric fascination with science and space exploration. Into her family's saga she weaves the story of the legendary JPL- examining the complexities of its cultural history, from its start in 1936 to the triumphant Mars landings in 2004. She illuminates its founder, Frank Malina, whose brilliance in rocketry was shadowed by a flirtation with communism, driving him from the country even as we welcomed Wernher von Braun and his Nazi colleagues. Lord's own love of science fiction becomes a lens through which she views a profound cultural shift in the male-dominated world of space. And in pursuing the cause of her father's absence she stumbles on a hidden guilt, understanding "the anguish his proud silence caused both him and me, and how rooted that silence was in the culture of engineering."As in her acclaimed book Forever Barbie, which demystified an icon of feminine culture, Lord brings her penetrating insight to bear on a bastion of American masculinity, opening our eyes in unexpected and memorable ways.

    Delving further, Shulman unearthed the surprising story behind the invention of the telephone: a tale of romance, corruption, and unchecked ambition. Bell furtively—and illegally—copied part of Elisha Gray’s invention in the race to secure what would become the most valuable U.S. patent ever issued. And afterward, as Bell’s device led to the world’s largest monopoly, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, he hid his invention’s illicit beginnings. In The Telephone Gambit, Shulman challenges the reputation of an icon of invention, rocks the foundation of a corporate behemoth, and offers a probing meditation on how little we know about our own history.

    Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives.The Unwinding journeys through the lives of several Americans, including Dean Price, the son of tobacco farmers, who becomes an evangelist for a new economy in the rural South; Tammy Thomas, a factory worker in the Rust Belt trying to survive the collapse of her city; Jeff Connaughton, a Washington insider oscillating between political idealism and the lure of organized money; and Peter Thiel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who questions the Internet's significance and arrives at a radical vision of the future. Packer interweaves these intimate stories with biographical sketches of the era's leading public figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics that capture the flow of events and their undercurrents.The Unwinding portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation. Packer's novelistic and kaleidoscopic history of the new America is his most ambitious work to date.One of the iTunes Bookstore's "Ten Books You Must Read This Summer"