“If you think you can stop me,” Edison said softly, “go ahead and try. But you’ll have to do it in the dark.”
That isn’t a direct quote from Thomas Alva Edison, legendary inventor of the incandescent light bulb. But to Graham Moore, author of The Last Days of Night, a historical novel released last month, it’s something the Wizard of Menlo Park could very well have said.
In a taut 384 pages, Moore, who won an Academy Award as the screenwriter for The Imitation Game, takes readers on a gripping ride with some of America’s most renowned figures—Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, Nikola Tesla, and J.P. Morgan—through a critical but overlooked period of history: the dawn of the electrical age.
Today, Americans have the luxury of taking for granted the miracle of electricity and its gifts. We flip a switch, we get light. We press a button, on comes our TV. We hardly give it a thought. But there was a time, in our not-too-distant past, when the sight of a flickering light bulb inspired awe and struck fear.
“People would describe their first experiences with a light bulb as if they were seeing a new color,” said Moore by phone from his Los Angeles office. “It was really such a breathtaking technology. People had never seen anything remotely like it before.”
In our interview, Moore described the electrical age as a “hinge moment in American history” that has “increased living standards in immeasurable ways.” Indeed, electricity has been an undeniable force for good in the world. Before abundant energy, most of which comes from fossil fuels, life for most of human history was nasty, brutish, short—and dark. Since the advent of electric power in the late 1800s, nearly every measure of human progress—life expectancy, infant mortality, GDP per capita—has improved dramatically.
The wonder of electricity is an undercurrent of Moore’s novel, but not its raison d’être. The central question is a seemingly simple one: “who invented the light bulb?” Posing this question, Moore sets the scene for the dramatic (and true) fight between Edison and Westinghouse, told from the perspective of Westinghouse’s young lawyer, Paul Cravath.
For Thomas Edison, the answer to the question of who invented the light bulb was easy. He held the patents, so he invented it. And strictly speaking, he was correct. Edison was the first person to file a patent for an “electric lamp.” The rub is that Edison claimed the patent covered not just his specific design, but all light bulbs. Therefore, “no other company had a legal right to manufacture incandescent bulbs, because incandescent light itself was covered by Edison’s patent,” writes Moore.
George Westinghouse thought this was preposterous. Westinghouse created a competing light bulb that he claimed was not only different from Edison’s, but better. But when Westinghouse tried to bring his product to market, Edison buried him in lawsuits for patent infringement. As Westinghouse laments, “Edison is not suing me—he is suing progress itself because he lacks the ability to invent it.”
That quotation captures a key theme of the book. The fight over who invented the light bulb is bigger than any one man, even giants like Edison and Westinghouse. It is about the ideas these men embody: Big Business versus free enterprise.
Throughout the book, Edison is portrayed as a brilliant and conniving tycoon who will stop at nothing to protect his company, and profits, from competition. As Moore writes, through the voice of Cravath, “To say that Thomas Edison had invented the lightbulb was bad for free enterprise. It was bad for scientific progress. It was bad for business. It was bad for consumers. And it was bad for the United States of America.”
In Moore’s telling, there is no newspaperman or politician Edison would not bribe, threaten, or cajole into doing his bidding. Consider this example. In addition to fighting over light bulb patents, Edison and Westinghouse were competing over who had the better system of electrical distribution: Edison’s direct current (DC) or Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC). Edison was better funded and had powerful backers, but “Westinghouse had this faith that he was making better products, so it would all work out,” explained Moore by phone.
History would prove AC the winner, but at the time DC was predominant. Edison wanted to keep it that way. But rather than improve his product in response to market forces, Edison conspired to tarnish Westinghouse’s reputation.
The State of New York was considering switching its method of execution from hanging to electrocution. Edison hired a lobbyist to convince the state legislature not only to adopt electrocution but to power the electric chair with Westinghouse’s AC generator. Instead of trying to beat Westinghouse in the marketplace, Edison made a lobbying and PR play: he wanted the public to associate his rival’s technology with death.
Contemporary political rhetoric often conflates Big Business with the free market. But as Moore told me, “On a political level, it’s something that doesn’t cut across clear left–right lines.”
Moore puts a finer point on this issue, in the voice of J.P. Morgan: “There is nothing of which we despair so much as a free market.” Elaborating in our interview, Moore added, “It is not in his interest to have two products in the marketplace and to let the public decide which it prefers. If you look at Morgan’s career, he was very good at creating monopolies.”
Indeed, large corporations routinely use the power of government to erect legal and legislative barriers that insulate them from competition by smaller firms. This stifles innovation, the cauldron of growth and prosperity.
The Last Days of Night is a work of historical fiction, which means the events are true but the sequence is compressed, while the dialogue is accurate in spirit but not necessarily in letter. Moore spent six years researching and writing the novel, poring over thousands of primary source documents. Though its pages are packed with detail, the novel is fast-paced. Moore keeps the reader rapt with short chapters and cliffhangers. At times, however, the reader can see the cliffhangers coming and wishes he would just get to the point.
Moore said he sees himself as a “technological optimist.” But at least one part of the story smacks of pessimism. Near the end of the novel, Edison predicts the age of truly remarkable innovation is over: “From here we can only build incrementally. Improvements. Not revolutions. No new colors, only new hues.” Here Edison underestimates the transformative power of his life’s work. Access to abundant and reliable energy, combined with human ingenuity, has led to the development of technologies as revolutionary as electricity itself, from putting a man on the Moon to creating the Internet.
I asked Moore about this line from Edison. His response: “I would suggest the light bulb was more fundamental” than those achievements.
He’s right, in this sense: the rapid pace of economic growth and technological advance over the last century is tied directly to the advent of abundant energy. Put simply, energy unlocks human ingenuity. The lasting legacy of Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla is not harnessing electricity and bringing it to the masses—it’s helping others harness the light within themselves.
Alex Fitzsimmons is an energy analyst who lives in Washington, D.C.
