This book was a fair read, but he never mentioned Tesla. I liked the history of the radar. Not sure what else to say about this book. One interesting thing is that when I visited the Henry Ford Museum there was hardly any mention of Tesla in the whole museum, but there is a lot on Edison. I believe that Tesla has been pretty much ignored in the past, but recently he seems to be getting the credit he is due.

It seems most of the negative reviews around this book focus on the lack of scientific details or things that were missed out. I fnd this strange because the book never claims to be an indepth explanation of the principles of electricity, but rather its history and the human stories behind each important discovery, and it does this very well. I particularly enjoyed the chapters about Alan Turing, the development of radar, and found the story of Alexander Graham Bell and his wife incredibly moving. The writing style is easy to read and digest and rattles along nicely. It doesn't get bogged down in the science but has enough knowledge behind it to present what it does well and intrigued me enough to make we want to read more on various subjects in greater depth. As an introduction to the subject it's a great place to start, or if science isn't your thing then there's enough of a human element packed with romance, subterfuge and adventure to appeal to the majority of readers.

Quite enjoyed the way that the author showed how we stumbled across all of the principles that we take for granted today. It took many years for things like telegraph, electricity, radio, radar to be discovered and mass produced. There was lots of dead end research and lucky breaks along the way to piece together how electrons and magnets rule our modern world. It certainly wasn't clear to me from my university physics classes that the early researchers had so little idea of what they were dealing with. Just what were those electrons, how can you measure them, how can you harness them for good (and evil too) ?? Just why do we call them volts, amps and watts ? A bit of interesting `dark' background to Samuel Morse and Alan Turing too.

This is no mere physics book. It links together the luminaries of the field in a way that makes for a book almost like a novel.

I'm really getting into these sorts of factoid type entertaining reads. So many trivium to fill my wee head !

From a human story standpoint, this nails it. But the way the science is described left me a bit queasy. (But that’s not how I was taught it?!!)

Some of my friends just had a transformer explode outside of their apartment, sending vast quantities of extra electricity back into their house, causing lights to explode and wall plugs to be surrounded by a fiery black halo of soot.

This book helped me understand what was going on a little better. David Bodanis makes the history of electricity discovery and growth eminently understandable, stopping along the way to introduce readers to Watt, Volta, Marconi, Edison, Herz, Bell, and other famed scientists, some I knew, and others I came to know.

I liked the blend of science know-how and history, especially.

On Podcasts and Electricity

As we were driving home from piano lessons one day, my mother (with my siblings’ eager consent) decided to play a podcast about the history of light, from candle wax to light bulb fixtures. The podcast cast a spell on us. As we were listening to the acknowledgments, a name of a certain book caught my mother’s ear. This book was afterwards given to me to read, and truly, the book is as interesting as the podcast itself.

Electric Universe, by David Bodanis, is a book on the history of electricity. This book tells of the many inventions that were created using the powers of electricity. Bodanis, a master science writer, explains many concepts in a clear-cut way as he describes this electric history.

Every chapter in Electric Universe reveals a new intriguing and informative fact. I looked forward to every word, and there are not very many books that can make the reader do that! Certainly, before I read Electric Universe I didn’t know that a telegram cable had been spread across the Atlantic Ocean, or that Alexander Graham Bell had mostly been motivated to work so the aurally impaired could communicate too. Now I have a delicious amount of interesting information stored in my head to munch on.

Bodanis has a clear, straightforward style that makes many topics easy to understand. Thanks to this book, I finally understood that electricity should not be represented in the cartoonish little-ball style, but as a wave. I also learned how cocaine and anesthetics work as I read about the effects of sodium ions in nerves, . Because of Bodanis’s transparent style, I understood many things.

Electric Universe is an excellent book because of its lucidity and interesting facts. I would recommend it to anyone who hasn’t the faintest idea about how electricity works, and especially to anyone who likes podcasts about electricity. And if you'd like to see more youth reviewed books, go to my blog, bookshelfexplorer.

Every time I thought maybe this isn't so bad, the Bodanis would make some outrageous claim or false history statement and I'd end up back where I started. Pretty poor.

Was not a great history of electricity. For whatever reason, Bodanis started the book with Samuel Morse's alleged theft of the telegraph from Joseph Henry, skipping over Volta, Galvani, Franklin, and various other milestones in electrical History. In general the book was rather awkwardly arranged, written in a bland manner. Though I did enjoy the re-imagining of the invention of the phone as the way to win the heart of Alexander Graham Bell's deaf lover, the book as a whole was a rather awkward history which sometimes read as sanctimonious judgment.

Look, isn't electricity important for modern life and interesting. And here are a few anecdotes about it. That's the whole point of this book, so I have just saved you from having to read it. You're welcome.

I'm giving this three stars because what's there is pretty good, for what it is. But it's a grudging rating, for the book has one glaring, unforgivable fault.

The idea of this book is that it's meant to be a beginner's introduction to the underlying concepts of electricity: how it works and what's going on, as well as interesting stories surrounding the discoveries of those concepts.

And to that extent, it succeeds.

Purists will be upset by this book because it uses the device of lies to children to get a lot of the ideas across; that is, it simplifies - sometimes grossly simplifies - concepts, sometimes even mischaracterizing them, in order to be able to make the information more understandable to people entirely new to the ideas.

But this book isn't meant for purists. If you already have a reasonably good understanding of how electricity works, skip this book - it isn't for you. It's meant for people who are just beginning to get it; for them, it works.

However (and here we come to the glaring flaw I mentioned), this book contains a sin of omission: there is Not. One. Mention of Nicola Tesla. In the section on Edison, no mention of his and Tesla's very public battle over whether the electric grid should be using direct current (Edison) or alternating current (Tesla), and why Tesla won (because he was right!).

In the bit about Marconi, he ignores the fact that many of Marconi's patents - based on the work of Tesla, among others - were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1943 (6 years after Marconi's death).

Given that much of the book is interesting stories about the scientists who discovered the properties of electricity and wrote its stories, it's curious - not to mention disquieting - that the Edison/Tesla conflict, at the very least (since it deals with an aspect of the electrical system that is still very important to us today) would be ignored.

Nice overview of the history of electricity. Interesting to see how our fundamental understanding of electrons led to new technologies.

Fascinating book about how electricity plays a central role in our everyday lives and how various scientists and inventors used it to ultimately improve everyday life. I thought Bodanis would go into more detail, but he seems to gloss over many issues.

Towards the end of the book, he moves from talking about electricity with regard to technology and starts talking about electricity and the human body (central nervous system). While this is interesting, it's not as well written as the rest of the book and feels like it was just tacked on.