“Fascinating…Maury Klein’s The Power Makers allows us to step back and remind ourselves—and we do need reminding—that the past two centuries have been a period of extraordinary invention…Fascinating.”—Wall Street Journal

In The Power Makers, one of America’s most acclaimed historians of business and society offers an epic narrative of his greatest subject yet—the “power revolution” that transformed American life in the course of the nineteenth century.

With consummate skill, Klein recreates the discoveries, the stunning triumphs and frequent failures, and the unceasing battles in the marketplace. The Power Makers is a dazzling saga of inspired invention, dogged persistence, and business rivalry at its most naked and cutthroat—a tale of America in its most astonishing decades.

Praise for The Power Makers:

“Klein’s book reads like a fairy tale…Klein himself rarely fails to reach for the full significance of events…If you haven’t given Boyle’s law much thought since the Reagan revolution, reading Klein will reward you with an excellent course in heat, electricity, and magnetism, at very little cost to your composure.”—New Yorker

“Maury Klein’s stories of heroic inventors creating the industrial revolution make the history of technology come alive.”—Daniel Walker Howe, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848