Product Description

In his bestselling E=mc2, David Bodanis led us, with astonishing ease, through the world’s most famous equation. Now, in Electric Universe, he illuminates the wondrous yet invisible force that permeates our universe—and introduces us to the virtuoso scientists who plumbed its secrets.

For centuries, electricity was seen as little more than a curious property of certain substances that sparked when rubbed. Then, in the 1790s, Alessandro Volta began the scientific investigation that ignited an explosion of knowledge and invention. The force that once seemed inconsequential was revealed to be responsible for everything from the structure of the atom to the functioning of our brains. In harnessing its power, we have created a world of wonders—complete with roller coasters and radar, computer networks and psychopharmaceuticals.

A superb storyteller, Bodanis weaves tales of romance, divine inspiration, and fraud through lucid accounts of scientific breakthroughs. The great discoverers come to life in all their brilliance and idiosyncrasy, including the visionary Michael Faraday, who struggled against the prejudices of the British class system, and Samuel Morse, a painter who, before inventing the telegraph, ran for mayor of New York City on a platform of persecuting Catholics. Here too is Alan Turing, whose dream of a marvelous thinking machine—what we know as the computer—was met with indifference, and who ended his life in despair after British authorities forced him to undergo experimental treatments to “cure” his homosexuality.

From the frigid waters of the Atlantic to the streets of Hamburg during a World War II firestorm to the interior of the human body, Electric Universe is a mesmerizing journey of discovery by a master science writer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1006006 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-15
• Released on: 2005-02-15
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

Amazon.com Review
Despite the fact that our lives are powered by electricity to an astonishing degree, most of us have little or no understanding of how or why it works. Instead, we rely on a blurry notion that it flows--like water--through wires to turn on our appliances. In Electric Universe, David Bodanis fools readers, by keeping them entertained and intrigued, into learning the science behind electricity. He does this by telling a series of stories, starting with how a backwoods American really invented the telegraph and how Samuel Morse stole the credit for it. From there, he works through the lives of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, and other pioneers. He shows how their experiments affected their lives--never more poignantly than with the tragic story of Alan Turing, whose early work designing computers wasn't enough to prevent him from being driven to suicide. It's surprisingly easy to identify with some of these brilliant scientists, because Bodanis relates their failures as well as their successes. In the end, although we may continue using words such as "current" to describe the "flow" of electrons, Bodanis makes certain that we see electrical energy for what it really is, at a subatomic, quantum level. Even so, there's not a single boring bit in the book. Electric Universe is an excellent scientific history, one that reveals both the progress of knowledge and the strange science of the wiggling electrons that run our lives. --Therese Littleton

From Publishers Weekly
This entertaining look at how electricity works and affects our daily lives is highlighted by Bodanis's charming narrative voice and by clever, fresh analogies that make difficult science accessible. Bodanis examines electricity's theoretical development and how 19th- and 20th-century entrepreneurs harnessed it to transform everyday existence. Going from "Wires" to "Waves" to computers and even the human body, Bodanis pairs electrical innovations with minibiographies of their developers, among them Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Guglielmo Marconi, Heinrich Herz and Alan Turing. In each case, Bodanis deepens his narrative by charting early failures—Edison's difficulty in finding a workable filament for the electric light bulb, for example—and financial struggles. And Bodanis can be a wry commentator on his subjects, noting, for example, how bedeviled Samuel Morse was by his telegraph patents—when the telegraph was actually invented by Joseph Henry, who refused to patent it. Surprisingly, Bodanis goes beyond the inorganic world of devices, delving deeply into the role electricity plays in the seemingly inhospitable "sloshing wet" human body, such as why being out in the cold makes us clumsy, or how alcohol works in the nervous system. Those who don't generally read science will find that Bodanis is a first-rate popularizer—as he also showed in his earlier E=MC2—able to keep a happy balance between technical explanation and accessibility.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In his hip history of electricity, Bodanis casts his work with its principal discoverers and animates it with smart, often cutting commentary about their achievements, peculiarities, and tragedies. If some of the figures were racists (e.g., telegraphy inventor Samuel Morse and transistor coinventor William Shockley), Bodanis lets loose as much on their faults as on their electrical merits. If they were romantics (e.g., telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell), the author plays up their more laudable traits. And if their lives were cut short (e.g., Heinrich Hertz, discoverer of radio waves, and Alan Turing, theorist of the computer), Bodanis parallels the intensity of their research with the gloomy foreknowledge of their fate. Bodanis integrates his human-interest approach with effective imagery of electricity's fugitive behavior, in which it acts like something tangible (the electron) and also nonmaterial (the electromagnetic wave). Bodanis demonstrates once again (after E=mc2 [2000]) his commercial appeal. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Very well written, but with serious omissions
This book is written clearly and is an excellent read, as far as the writing style goes. It's a great shame that the book has serious omissions which make it unsuitable for the telling the "shocking true story of electricity."

As other reviewers have pointed out, there is no mention of the great Nikola Tesla, who far outshined engineers and physicists of his time. Nikola Tesla was responsible for the electricity industry, not Thomas Edison. Tesla was also responsible for radio, not Marconi. This was an enormous issue of its day and resulted in a court case that awarded recognition to Nikola Tesla for his work on wireless (radio).

I also find it strange how that horrible character Edison is given so much praise. He was a nasty individual who took Tesla for a jolly ride and twice refused to pay Tesla for work that probably saved his [Edison's] company. Edison also organized the public electrocution of live animals to shock the public into support for his inferior DC electricity distribution (as opposed to Tesla's AC system, purchased by Westinghouse). Edison was a marketing, business and propaganda master, not a scientist. (He was a gifted inventor however).

Further, Tesla made great improvements to the lighting systems of the day, was the first to light up a massive stadium, winning the job over Edison's DC proposal, single-handedly designed and built the Niagara Falls plant (where a statue of Tesla stands to this day), and built the first radio-controlled device. Tesla also had the first patents on anything resembling modern digital electronics (the AND gate). There is speculation that this might be why IBM and DEC failed to patent logic circuits.

The entire twentieth century was practically invented (certainly "illuminated!") by Nikola Tesla, and yet he is given no credit in this book. That destroys the credibility of this book in my view, unless you use this book as a history of electricity until 1880 or thereabouts.

There is an explanation for the omission of Nikola Tesla in most books on electricity and electronics. Tesla arguably went "slightly funny" in his old age, and lost the credibility he had as a younger man. Tesla was nearly as famous as Albert Einstein in his prime. Einstein personally sent Tesla a telegram for his birthday.

Tesla is also strongly associated with conspiracy theories about the US government covering up cheap wireless generation and distribution of electricity. This is almost certainly nonsense. Tesla's wireless and electricity patents are available for all from the US patent office and Tesla patent collection CDs can be purchased cheaply over the Internet. Nobody has yet built one of his wireless "free energy" gizmos and made it work. Tesla was therefore almost certainly mistaken in his belief about the potential of his wireless research.

Only Presents Half the Story of Electricity!!
+++++

In this book author and former professor David Bodanis presents "the shocking true story of electricity." Actually this book is more about electrical devices through history and the scientists who created them. The electrical devices investigated are as follows: telegraph, telephone, light bulb, electric motor, radio, radar, and computer. Even human biological devices are looked into-specifically the nervous system and brain. Bodanis says this more eloquently:

"The world is made of electric charges and our technologies operate through electric charges, and even our brains are powered by electric charges."

The author does present some of the science behind electricity. (Electricity is a general term used for all phenomena caused by electric charge.) But he seems to concentrate only on DC or Direct Current (a term he never uses). (Direct Current is electric charge always flowing in the same direction.) Nothing (not one word!!) is said about the more important AC or Alternating Current and its colorful scientific history. This I feel was a major, major oversight. (Alternating Current is a flow of electric charge that periodically reverses its direction.)

Chapter 1 to chapter 6 of this 12-chapter book presents the scientific history of direct current. I feel Bodanis does a decent job here with his explanations and portraits of major scientists. In fact, I feel that his writing style is very engaging throughout the book.

The next two chapters discuss radar. Unfortunately, the author goes into way too much detail about the war effort and strays significantly off topic. I feel all this information was not needed.

Chapter 9 and chapter 10 discuss the idea of a "thinking machine" (what we now call the computer) and the man behind this revolutionary idea. As well, this man's legacy is explained. This information is well presented.

The last two chapters look into human biology. Here we learn that "our entire body operates by electricity." I found this information very interesting but felt that most of it was not relevant to the theme of the book.

There are two more brief sections at the end of this book. They are entitled as follows:

(1) "What happened next." This section profiles what happened to the major people mentioned in this book. Some of these people include Samuel Morse, Alexander G. Bell, Edison, Faraday, Hertz, and Turing. I found this section interesting.

(2) "Mr. Amp, Mr. Volt, and Mr. Watt." These units (amp, volt and watt) describe, according to Bodanis, "what's happening inside all...electric devices." What happened to Mr. Ohm? An ohm is a measure of electrical resistance. I thought not mentioning this unit was a major oversight.

Finally, there are no illustrations in this book. I felt simple diagrams would have reduced the book's wordiness. As well, pictures of some of the major people mentioned would have been nice.

In conclusion, this is a well-written book about electricity that has some major oversights and that, in some cases, presents irrelevant information.

(first published 2005; introduction; 6 parts or 12 chapters; 2 concluding sections; main narrative 235 pages; notes; further reading; acknowledgements; index)

+++++

The lights are on, but nobody can explain it.
In Electric Universe, David Bodanis attempts to tell the "true story of electricity." This might have been a worthy effort were it not for his incredible ignorance of basic electrical theory. Time and again, he attempts to enlighten the reader with clever analogies to explain the behavior of electricity. More often than not, he only succeeds in displaying his inability to grasp the central concepts he is struggling to elucidate.

The examples are too numerous to list here, but a few examples will give you a taste:

On page 37,in attempting to explain a telephone receiver, he states that a strong electric current causes the diaphragm to move quickly while a weak current causes it to move slowly. This misses the more important point that it is moving faster because it moves further in response to a greater current.

On page 46, he implies that the reason Edison's light bulbs retained their vacuum was because of how tightly the bases were attched to the bulbs. Anyone who has ever detached a bulb from its base know that it is the sealed glass envelope which prevents air from entering.

Page 52 tells us that the darkening inside a light bulb is caused by the electrons streaming off the filament "etching" the glass. In fact, it is the deposition of metal ions from the filament that causes this.

He tells us on page 84 that the warnings given about not touching the parts of de-energized equipment (like the high-voltage section of a TV) is due to static buildup on the metal parts. He doesn't seem to know what a capacitor or capacitance is. Which, by the way, explains why he informs us on page 88 that Napolean's favoring of Volta is why we measure electrical potential in volts rather than "faradays." He never once mentions that capacitance is measured in farads, even when he describes the origin of the terms volt, ampere, watt and Hertz.

Finally, he avers that the short waves used by the German radars were superior because the longer waves the British used spread wider. In fact, the resolution of all wave-based imaging systems (microscopes, radars, telescopes, sonar, medical ultrasound) is a direct funtion of the wavelength of the signal. Shorter wavelengths resolve smaller details.

It astounds me that someone can be deemed a "science writer" and not have the scientific sophistication of an undergraduate physics student. The fact that real writers of the stature of Simon Singh and Ross King could allow their names to be used on the cover blurbs leads me to think they never opened the book. Did he even bother to have an electrical engineer or physics professor critique it before he submitted it? What is his editor paid for?

Based on other reviews I have seen, he hasn't done much better with the history part, either. That said, I can think of no reason for reading this book, unless you are in the mood for fiction.