Electric Universe
by David Bodanis
Summary
Bodanis tells the history of electricity as a chain of possessed individuals, each seized by a force nobody could see, and the storytelling voltage is deliberately high: this is the romantic, character driven account, science biography at the pace of fiction.
The cast carries the current. Faraday, the bookbinder's apprentice whose religious conviction that forces formed invisible webs led him to the field concept his betters lacked the mathematics to imagine. Morse and the telegraph, wiring continents while feuding over credit. Bell, listening to his deaf pupils, and the accident of the telephone. Edison and the industrialisation of invention. Hertz, proving the invisible waves and dying young without learning what they would become; Marconi making them an empire. The engineers of the Atlantic cable, paying out copper across an ocean floor. Then the darker chapters: radar's mathematicians winning the Battle of Britain from huts, Alan Turing electrifying logic itself into the first computers, and the transistor and the wired world arriving with the transistor's inventors quarrelling. Threaded through is the strangest chapter, the discovery that electricity was never outside us at all: nerves and synapses run on the same force, the body its own wet circuitry, which lets the book end where the reader keeps it, in the hand holding the page.
Precision is sometimes traded for momentum, and specialists have grumbled; general readers, which is the intended circuit, complete it happily.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the electric century as human drama, and a painless education in how the invisible force was tamed.
Historical Context & Significance
Electric Universe won the Aventis Prize in 2006, the judging chair Nick Ross calling it wonderfully accessible and simply a very good read, and it confirmed David Bodanis's franchise: the American born, London based writer had found his form with E=mc², a biography of an equation, and applied the same method here, technical history told entirely through its people, the approach that made him a fixture of the popular science shelf and a favourite target of purists who count his simplifications.
The win itself acquired a small footnote in prize history: 2006 was Aventis's final year as sponsor, and Bodanis pledged the ten thousand pounds to the family of David Kelly, the government scientist at the centre of the row over Iraq war intelligence, calling it a gesture about the importance of truth.
His later books, Einstein's Greatest Mistake on Einstein's life and Passionate Minds on Voltaire and Emile du Chatelet, kept the storyteller's stance; this one remains the standard gateway history of electricity for readers who want the people first and the equations nowhere.