Customer Reviews

The Electric City: Energy and the Growth of the Chicago Area, 1880-1930

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book was a great reading experience for me. Part of my job is to teach electric utility system operators. I always try to give them some background in the history of the business and how their job evolved through the years. Professor Platt used Commonwealth Edison and Chicago for his model of how electricity changed life in America. Chicago was on the cutting edge more so than other cities because of the Great Fire of 1871. The downtown area had to be totally rebuilt so this offered an open-field opportunity to try the new electric technology.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in American urban development in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though the book focuses on Chicago, the same pattern would hold true for other large American cities. Professor Platt has done an outstanding job of research. This is a treasure trove of charts, graphs and other data that show how the industry grew from several independent lighting companies competing against each other in the 1880s, into the beginning of an interconnected super-power system by the 1920s.

The author provides a lot of material on Samuel Insull, the unsung hero of the business. Insull was the Henry Ford of electric power mass-production. He had the vision and financial genius to set up the model for the industry that existed until the 1990s when deregulation came around. It is largely thanks to Insull that we have the system we take for granted today. Insull was involved in scandal late in life. He made powerful political enemies by donating huge sums of money to favorable candidates, in one case over $125,000 to a U.S. Senator-elect from Illinois. This would-be senator was denied his seat in the Senate when it was revealed how Insull had helped him get elected. Insull was eventually indicted for mail fraud for which he was acquitted, but not before it ruined him financially. One cannot study the history of the electric utility business without studying Insull.

The book is not a dry read by any means. The writing is brisk and moves at a good pace. Because of my unique interest in ComEd history, I was constantly pausing to make notes in the margins or to just reflect on how certain installations still existing today got their start. I'm sure I'll be referring to this book many times to research questions about the history of the business.

This book is a history of the electrification of the city of Chicago. It is not a narrative history, rather it is a more scholarly (dry!) work with lots of tables and charts. Still, it's an interesting series of events I wasn't aware of. Starting in the more downtown areas and moving towards the suburbs, numerous small companies were established that sold electricity to nearby customers. Surprisingly for a number of years they existed side by side with companies providing gas for illumination. The author notes that it often wasn't a matter of the customers demanding electrification of their neighborhood, rather it was a start-up small electricity supplier being nearby that convinced customers to give electricity a try. Very much like the way we saw the early ISP surge in the 1990s. Ultimately, this being Chicago, local politics soon intervened and the companies that survived and ate up the others were the ones which had the best political connections.

Recommended only for those who are willing to plod through a very academic study.