AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War - Tom McNichol [pdf]

AC/DC tells the little-known story of how Thomas Edison wrongly bet in the fierce war between supporters of alternating current and direct current. The savagery of this electrical battle can hardly be imagined today. The showdown between AC (Tesla, who worked for Westinghouse) and DC (Edison) began as a rather straightforward conflict between technical standards, a battle of competing methods to deliver essentially the same product, electricity. But the skirmish soon metastasized into something bigger and darker.

In the AC/DC battle, the worst aspects of human nature somehow got caught up in the wires; a silent, deadly flow of arrogance, vanity, and cruelty. Following the path of least resistance, the war of currents soon settled around that most primal of human emotions: fear. AC/DC serves as an object lesson in bad business strategy and poor decision making.

A note of caution: this book is far too kind to Edison and largely ignores his plagiarism of the inventions of others, especially Nikola Tesla.