The novel’s blue-collar workers, along with the great ones’ wives are a mix of fact and fiction. Jacob Schoellkopf, Nikola Tesla, George Westinghouse and Edward Dean Adams, however, are as historically accurate as their sources: Schoellkopf‘s papers Tesla’s biography, and Adams two volume report on the woes and wonders of building powerhouses to generate Alternating Current.
These heroes are plagued by challenges and setbacks that destroy lesser beings. Thomas Alva Edison launches a Battle of the Currents and pays a hireling to kill horses, dogs and cats on stage to "prove" Alternating Current is dangerous to man. But the King of Direct Current, Jacob Schoellkopf, quietly accepts facts when Adams raises money to buy building sites, hires Tesla and Westinghouse to provide the necessary machines, as builds AC plants next to his DC powerhouses.
Adams, a New York banker whose business acumen made him preferable to great engineers, wages war with hired diggers and slum dwellers that live atop the project’s tunnel site. But Adams’ delight in creating an electrical archetype for the world and a model city for mid-level employees of his dig is short lived. While Tesla funnels two million volts of electricity through his unprotected body at Chicago’s Columbus Exposition Preview, Rudy Brouder, a scoundrel from the Falls’ slums, kills a woman on stage to "prove" the danger of AC.
Each year 8.1.mllion tourists visit the Falls of Niagara. Most leave with picture postcard impressions – not realizing that during the 1900’s, the Niagara River spawned an Industrial Revolution whose inventions lighted the workload of mankind.
