Man who set the pattern for bringing power to our cities

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

THE MERCHANT OF POWER: SAM INSULL, THOMAS EDISON, AND THE CREATION OF THE MODERN METROPOLIS

By John Wasik

Palgrave Macmillan, $35, 271 pages

REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES

It helps to remember that the legends of America's industrial golden age were just ordinary men. While greatness came because they mastered something important, the rest of the time they often were indifferent personalities at best. Think of Ford, of Carnegie or of Rockefeller.

Or of Samuel Insull, now largely forgotten, but who once ranked with the greatest of the great and whose triumphs influence the way we live today, the way the automobile, steel or oil have. Like some others his fatal flaw was a giant moral black hole, but unlike them, he was brought very low indeed, a victim of his own obtuseness.

Samuel Insull was born into poverty in 1859 in London's seedy Lambeth district. He did not stay there long. He picked up the shorthand and the other organizational skills of an office clerk with such alacrity that by the time he was 21 he was in New York and the principal private secretary to the marvel of the age Thomas Edison. Famous already from his improvements of the telegraph, Edison was on the brink of building the first large electricity generating plant to illuminate Wall Street. The year was 1882 and the Golden Age of financial wheeling and dealing began to glow in earnest.

The genius inventor was a mess. Untidy in his person, Edison was an even sloppier businessman and remained always more interested in the technical side of his creations than in their most profitable use. For example, he viewed providing illumination for the area around his power stations as a way to sell his other breakthrough invention -- light bulbs -- and not as a way to sell electricity itself.

Sam Insull quickly brought order out of the chaos that was Edison's financial life. While Edison often went without sleep while he experimented, Insull matched him in energetically organizing the financial structure of the shambolic maze of special-purpose corporations the inventor had organized to make and market his cornucopia of inventions.