While working on my histories of the South Bronx and illegal drugs in America, I became fascinated with the Gilded Age, the era after the Civil War when America became rich, industrialized, and a great melting pot of ambitious strivers. A horse and buggy world of farming and small merchants was swiftly giving way to vast railroads, big cities, amazing new technologies, venal political bosses, and evermore powerful corporations. I began looking for a Gilded Age story that captured this sense of tremendous energy and astonishing change. While researching a railroad, I stumbled across The War of the Electric Currents.

   Like everyone else, I knew Thomas Edison was a famous American hero who had invented the light bulb, the phonograph, and played an important role in the early movie industry. What I didn't know was how down and dirty the Wizard of Menlo Park could get. When I discovered that he had helped promote the first use of the electric chair as a way to discredit George Westinghouse and AC, I became very interested. When I learned the broad outlines of the infamous feud, I thought, "This is an amazing tale." Having written two books that sprawled across a century and involved large and changing casts of characters, Empires of Light was especially appealing. It featured three enthralling titans, played out over a mere fifteen years, and (in contrast to urban decay and drugs) was about the creation of a noble technology that truly changed the world for the better.

   It was pure pleasure to spend two years with my three titans. Edison, while not at his finest here, was pretty endearing. I treasured his wonderfully colorful and frank persona, and his absolutely innate sense of self-promotion. George Westinghouse, familiar only as a brand name, turned out to be a most compelling and charismatic man, but far more difficult to capture on the page. Unlike Edison, Westinghouse generally shunned publicity and left almost no written records. He hated being photographed. Contrast the hundreds of photos we have of Edison versus the twelve or so that remain of Westinghouse. I was beginning to despair of really getting to know the man when I came across many dozens of reminiscences saved in the small Westinghouse Museum archives.

   And then there was the incomparably eccentric and lovable Nikola Tesla, an author's dream. This brilliant, erudite man wrote with surprising candor about his visionary scientific inventions, his many tough times, and his multiple strange phobias (women wearing pearls was just one). In the end, George Westinghouse was my favorite titan, a modest millionaire-idealist in the era of rampant Robber Barons, a hard-driving achiever devoted to his companies and employees, and a sweetly tender husband.

   The other joy of working on Empires of Light was becoming a regular reader of the time's incredible newspapers. In this age before radio, television, and common use of photographs, journalists exercised all seven senses in their reportage. The detail and color were manna to a historian. Cities like New York and Chicago had half a dozen excellent newspapers, each with its own personality and politics and each competing ferociously.

   The greatest challenge in writing Empires of Light was trying to evoke the world before electricity, a technology utterly intrinsic to the modern world and completely taken for granted. It's just hard to remember or imagine what life was like without it.