Benz from selling the former because of the existence of the latter? Of course not. My light bulb is to his as a motor wagon is to a horse-drawn carriage. 'I did not copy Edison's design for the light bulb. Your difficulty is that he's the one with the patent.' It's the latter issue that is of legal concern. There are a dozen companies across this country making bulbs of more advanced design than Edison's. 'Edison's bulbs are terrible-poor-quality designs, two generations behind mine. 'Thomas Edison has sued you for infringing on his patent on the incandescent light bulb.'

In the time since his invitation to dinner, he'd devoured all the newspaper accounts of Westinghouse's legal troubles. Here's a good passage that helps illustrate how the book is historical and you can learn a lot, yet it's a story, it keeps your interest, and it's characters 'acting' to tell the story, not a textbook. And to think we are still figuring out if that is cruel and unusual punishment or not. The description of the first use of an electric chair is just horrific. In that fight, the invention of the electric chair was a tool to prove a point. I had no idea! Direct current and alternating current were big concepts that had a lot to do with safety and costs and what worked over a distance and therefore what made sense to provide electricity for cities, and from there, everything else. There was also a big hullabaloo about DC and AC. The courts keep ruling that Edison invented the light bulb and Westinghouse improved it, but Westinghouse believes he truly invented something new, not just an improvement. Westinghouse is suing Edison for the light bulb patent.

Paul becomes employed by George Westinghouse pretty much straight out of law school. The main character is a lawyer named Paul Cravath. He felt he could determine if something would or would not work through, I think, exploring it thoroughly in his mind, and he didn't need to do all that actual experimenting. I've just found ten thousand ways that don't work.' But one of Tesla's issues with Edison was that when he was working in Edison's lab, they would have to experiment over and over and Tesla found that a waste of time. It was interesting to read again Thomas Edison's quote 'I have not failed. They were often by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and others of that ilk.

I liked the quotes at the beginning of each chapter.

The last days of night a novel