Last Days of Night

by Graham Moore

Random House     2016

384 pages      Historical Fiction

Greenfield Village is an historic village recreation in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. Among its many exhibits are those specific to the industrial revolution and the era of invention. Greenfield Village was designed and created by Henry Ford, one of the scions of both eras. Among the exhibits is a replica of Thomas Edison's Menlo Park laboratory. Thomas Edison is revered as one of the greats of American initiative and invention. In the book Last Days of Night by Graham Moore, however, he is a villain as he attempts to drive his rival George Westinghouse out of business. Edison has invented DC current and the light bulb, and Westinghouse is electrifying entire towns with a more useable AC current and a different light bulb. 

A very young, inexperienced lawyer, Paul Cravath, is hired in 1888 by Westinghouse to deal with the myriad lawsuits Edison filed against him—lawsuits worth about $1 billion. It was Cravath's first case, and also the case upon which Cravath built a successful law firm in New York City that still bears his name.

AC current was invented by Nikola Tesla and its advantage over DC current was that it could extend electric current a much further distance than DC and was also safer. Tesla's AC current was revolutionizing electricity, which made Edison furious and afraid for his company, Edison General Electric. In an attempt to stop Tesla, Edison has his lower Manhattan laboratory burned. Tesla escapes and Cravath helps hide him for several months for his safety but also to protect the court case he is developing for Westinghouse.

Here is where a fascinating character named Agnes Huntington enters the narrative. Agnes is a young Metropolitan Opera singer, who meets Cravath and Tesla and helps hide Tesla. She is extremely beautiful,  smart and inventive, and Cravath falls in love with her, but he is just a young lawyer from Tennessee and she is a New York celebrity, highly involved in Manhattan society. Turns out she is just a girl from Kalamazoo, attempting to make a new life for herself in New York. The love story is a small but significant part of the story.

Nikola Tesla comes off as the most interesting of the characters. His mind was so creative that he wanted nothing more than to do his experiments and eat soda crackers. Several of his creations—his  inventions—were so ahead of their time, like the wireless phone, that they have just recently come to fruition. Because he had to be way on the autism spectrum in today's parlance, all his actions were construed to be extremely strange, and he became a curiosity in New York society.

Moore deftly melds historical fact with historical fiction to create a marvelous look at invention, ingenuity, and business in the late 1800s. Names we know from history, like J.P. Morgan, are bandied about, and my husband and I, as we read Last Days of Night aloud, had a marvelous time looking up the events trying to decide which were fact and which were fiction. This is historical fiction at its absolute best.

Review in the Washington Post.

Moore is the author of the well regarded The Sherlockian and won an Academy Award for the  screenplay to The Imitation Game. Here is his website.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World

by Steven Johnson

Riverhead Books    2014

293 pages     Nonfiction

Steven Johnson has created an eminently readable adventure into the history of innovation with How We Got to Now. Johnson has a unique way of looking at all the scattered fragments of innovation that come to the point that something new is created. He looks at six concepts that we pretty much take for granted: glass, cold, sound, clean, time, and light and shows how inventions and innovations, logical and technological, came from those basic concepts.  

  For example, Johnson connects the invention of the printing press to the invention of glasses to the microscope to the invention of fiberglass to fiberoptic cables. See the connection? Or, how the invention of the mirror turns society from outward looking to inward looking. He tells the story of a man who built ships to take ice to the Caribbean in the early 1800s, and then he explains how that need for cold created the air conditioning and refrigeration that we now take for granted. I am old enough to remember the ice chest that we had at our cabin and the ice house on the other side of the island where we went to get blocks of ice, cut out of the lake in the winter by the iceman. 

Have you ever thought about how your city got their sewers? Not something that we tend to think about, or how the development of new toilet design is changing the culture of third world countries? Johnson tells us all about it. One of the most fascinating stories discusses how the invention of flash photography led to the antipoverty programs of the early 20th century. Jacob Riis used his camera with its flash to take pictures inside the tenements of New York. Riis had been appalled by the conditions and had been writing about them for a long time, but it wasn't until he published pictures created with flash photography that the world took notice. 

Johnson shows us that progress is seldom linear, that little bits and pieces connect together in a seeming hodgepodge of relationships that fit together to create the world we know now. The people he talks about are for the most part obscure—Dennison and watch making, Birdseye—frozen food, Gorrie—artificial ice, or Babbage—computers. However, their innovations led to other innovations which led to the modern world.

My husband and I read about these miracles of innovation every morning. How We Got To Now is science for novices, extremely easy to read aloud and understand. There is also a connecting six part series on PBS, each episode covering one of Johnson's concepts. You will love this book. Suddenly the world becomes clear—just like putting on a pair of glasses!

Here is a penetrating review in the New York Times.