Maury Klein is a book-writing machine, and he is good at it. In his fourteen previous books, four published in the last eight years, he has written about the Union Pacific railroad, railroad men such as Jay Gould and E. H. Harriman, entrepreneurs of various persuasions (“change makers”), the antebellum American South, the Crash of 1929, and American industrialization. He has an ability to take a subject, study it quickly but very thoroughly, and to write a book that, while not breaking any new ground in terms of methodology or interpretation, summarizes existing knowledge and organizes it into an accurate, compelling, and well-written tale. This is a service to the profession. One difficulty with this approach is that it sometimes is a bit difficult to determine exactly what audience (scholars, students, or the general public) is best suited for the book, which is true for The Power Makers.

The Power Makers is a history of steam power and electricity in the United States, from their scientific and technical inceptions through the fall of Samuel Insull's utility empire during the Great Depression. Methodologically, Klein certainly is no social constructionist; he appears to be a rather unabashed technological determinist: “Industrialization created the modern world… [and] … made the United States and the power revolution made industrialization. Similarly, technology made the electrical revolution and electricity made the technological revolution” (p. xi). Thus, technology created the modern world and made the United States. Klein recognizes the role of individuals in creating technology; a large number of individuals and their contributions are discussed in the book. Klein does not address the issue of whether things would have turned out differently, for example, if Thomas Edison had never existed, perhaps a fruitless endeavor. While I believe that causality actually flows in many different directions, it is certain that steam and electric power contributed substantially to the modern, developed world, and that is sufficient reason to study their histories.

There really are two or three books packaged into one here, a short one, comprising the first three of twenty chapters, on the steam engine; a much longer one, comprising the bulk of the book, on the history of electric power focusing on technology and the electrical manufacturers; and a final one, comprising two chapters, that perhaps could be considered part of the electric story, focusing on Samuel Insull, the electric utility magnate, a dominant but far from sole player in the dramatic events in the electric utility industry in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Klein has framed the book very cleverly in a prologue, interior chapter, and epilogue. He has a fictional boy named Ned travel from his home in Iowa to visit the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 (prior to electric lights, where a giant Corliss steam engine powered the Machinery Hall and was a big hit), then as a young man to visit the Columbian Exposition, or World's Fair, in Chicago in 1893 (which was powered and lighted spectacularly by a Westinghouse alternating current system), and finally later in life to visit the New York World's Fair in 1939 (where electricity permeated and simply seemed common place and thus less exciting). Describing the fairs, their exhibits, and Ned's reaction to them allows Klein to document in an entertaining way the changes that had taken place over the period covered by his book.

The book proceeds chronologically, with relatively short chapters covering many topics. Klein introduces a topic, which may be a scientific or technological innovation, an incident in the history of the industry (such as the AC/DC controversy and the adoption of the electric chair as a means of execution), a patent infringement case, or a major merger (for example, the one between Thomson-Houston and Edison General Electric in 1892 that created General Electric and signaled the exit of Thomas Edison from the industry he helped create). He discusses the individuals involved in the innovation or incident, often adding interesting biographical background. He relies primarily on standard secondary sources for the bulk of details, but has supplemented these sources with newspapers and industry magazines such as Electrical World. This supplemental material makes a given topic livelier. I believe that the best part of the book, the bulk of it, covers the development of electricity and the electrical manufacturers from scientific and technological origins up to the point in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century where the founders, principally Edison and Westinghouse, were out of the picture. The material on the steam engine was informative, and I learned a few things, but a lot of ground was covered very quickly. The decision to focus on Insull to represent the great electric utility entrepreneurs was understandable, but basically disappointing because so many of the other characters of the late 1920s boom, and the tremendous merger wave of the time, were left out of the picture. Overall, the book was an enjoyable and satisfying read.

This leaves the question of audience. Specialists in the history of steam power or the electric power industry in the United States may garner a few additional tidbits of information from the book, but it is not path breaking. The book is entirely about the domestic industry, and foreign scholars who crave detail about the U.S. steam and electric power industry may find the book to be quite useful. Could the book be used in an undergraduate U.S. economic history class? I doubt it because it is too detailed and covers only a small sliver of economic history. It might, however, be appropriate in a graduate or upper level undergraduate history seminar covering the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. The book definitely will appeal to the intelligent, diligent general reader, who most likely is not reading this review. I will look forward to the next installment of Maury Klein's endeavors.