How electricity came to be: its innovators and their sparks

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FLEET FIRE; THOMAS EDISON AND THE PIONEERS OF THE ELECTRIC REVOLUTION

By L.J. Davis

Arcade, $25.95, 360 pages

REVIEWED BY WOODY WEST

And then there was the time Thomas Alva Edison electrocuted an elephant. Intentionally.

Edison's zapping of the elephant followed an associate's electrocution of a dog, then a calf and then a horse. The quadruped slaughter was intended by Edison to demonstrate the lethality of Alternating Current, which his competitor, the talented George Westinghouse, was using in his lighting systems; Edison was a proponent of less economically efficient Direct Current to which he had committed resources and reputation, and he was frantic to discredit Westinghouse.

The lurid electrocution episode in the late 1880s is but one of the many illuminating waysides in L.J. Davis's "Fleet Fire" about the coming of electricity. The book relies on secondary sources and, as a signpost of the writerly future, also lists two pages of websites he has used. The literature on the principals in these pages is vast, and this book could have been a cut-and-paste job in the hands of a less competent writer.

Mr. Davis, however, brings to the account the novelist's grasp of character and context and the journalist's eye for the pungent and anecdotal -- in both of which callings he has credentials. As a result, this is a coherent and informative narrative.The author provides a primer for those of us who are toward the doltish end of scientific literacy: