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Simply Electrifying
- The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
Simply Electrifying: The Technology That Transformed the World, from Benjamin Franklin to Elon Musk brings to life the 250-year history of electricity through the stories of the men and women who used it to transform our world: Benjamin Franklin, James Watt, Michael Faraday, Samuel F.B. Morse, Thomas Edison, Samuel Insull, Albert Einstein, Rachel Carson, Elon Musk, and more. In the process, it reveals for the first time the complete, thrilling, and often dangerous story of electricity's historic discovery, development, and worldwide application.
Electricity plays a fundamental role not only in our everyday lives but in history's most pivotal events, from global climate change and the push for wind- and solar-generated electricity to Japan's nuclear accident at Fukushima and Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Written by electricity expert and four-decade veteran of the industry, Craig R. Roach, Simply Electrifying marshals, in fascinating narrative detail, the full range of factors that shaped the electricity business over time - science, technology, law, politics, government regulation, economics, business strategy, and culture - before looking forward toward the exhilarating prospects for electricity generation and use that will shape our future.
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Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Alexander Douglass
- 12-28-18
decent, but ended up disappointing.
struggled to finish. thought it would be a good book about electricity from an engineering perspective, but is just a political science book. first chapters were good, but ended up talking politics. disappointing.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 01-01-18
Good read/listen
Very interesting. Good book overall. Covers great history. Goes into detail on many different topics.
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5 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Jonathan
- 10-14-19
deceptive junk
I wanted pure history of electricity but what I got was pure garbage about politics, environmental theories, and just babblings.
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4 people found this helpful
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- MGGGK9
- 10-23-23
Interesting to boring
This book is not what it says it is. The first quarter actually focuses on the discovery and applications of electricity, but after that it’s all about the bureaucracy of how electricity was integrated into society. Struggled through as long as I could, but had to give up. Not worth the time.
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- Dan Cohen
- 06-26-23
Boring
boring book and monotone narrator. not my worst purchase. I was really not expecting so many hours of electricity policy and environmental concerns about coal. it would have been better to leave politics out and talk about the modernizations of generators and renewable power mechanics more.
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- Calvert
- 05-15-23
EHHH
Cool background Franklin and Faraday but felt a bit dull and at times a bit bla bla. Georg Ohm could have used more shine.
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- Troy L. Hester
- 06-15-20
Broader than my narrow interest.
From my perspective, this book starts strong with a sweeping treatment of the birth of the science of electricity. My interests are more technical, however, and the book later devotes considerable time to the business, policy, politics, and regulation of the industry. Nothing wrong with that; it's just not my primary interest.
The latter treatment of renewable energy and Elon Must was disappointingly brief, however I must admit that chapter of history is still unfolding.
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- Greenash22
- 11-05-18
great listen ,
enjoyed listening to the history and individual struggles and success of those who help shape today as we know it
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Overall

- Owen bartrop
- 04-30-20
Economics of the electric industry
Focused a lot about the political and economic side of the utility industry. Worth the listen.
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- David Alley
- 12-09-17
Fascinating
This is a fascinating story and has sent me to Google to learn more and deliver into the world of Maxwell and Faraday.
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Story
Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world's physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called "the Pope" by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass destruction and conversely to life-saving medical interventions. This unassuming man struggled with issues relevant today, such as the threat of nuclear annihilation and the relationship of science to politics.
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Excellent, but...
- By Rubio on 02-28-17
By: Gino Segre, and others
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A Question of Power
- Electricity and the Wealth of Nations
- By: Robert Bryce
- Narrated by: Robert Bryce
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Global demand for power is doubling every two decades, but electricity remains one of the most difficult forms of energy to supply and do so reliably. Today, some three billion people live in places where per-capita electricity use is less than what's used by an average American refrigerator. How we close the colossal gap between the electricity rich and the electricity poor will determine our success in addressing issues like women's rights, inequality, and climate change.
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Not the complete story
- By John on 08-11-20
By: Robert Bryce
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Electric Universe
- How Electricity Switched on the Modern World
- By: David Bodanis
- Narrated by: Del Roy
- Length: 6 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Electric Electricity
- By M. Sweeney on 02-27-05
By: David Bodanis
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Plutopia
- Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
- By: Kate Brown
- Narrated by: Susan Ericksen
- Length: 18 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias - communities of nuclear families living in highly subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society while nearby, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were banned from plutopia - they lived in temporary "staging grounds" and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant.
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Mourning an Eternity of Radioactive Pollution
- By Will Szal on 01-01-19
By: Kate Brown
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Computing: A Concise History
- The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series
- By: Paul E. Ceruzzi
- Narrated by: Tim Andres Pabon
- Length: 3 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The history of computing could be told as the story of hardware and software or the story of the Internet or the story of "smart" handheld devices, with subplots involving IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. In this concise and accessible account of the invention and development of digital technology, computer historian Paul Ceruzzi offers a broader and more useful perspective. He identifies four major threads that run throughout all of computing's technological development.
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Fantastic ride down memory lane
- By GeekZoneHosting Com LLC on 08-25-16
By: Paul E. Ceruzzi
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Tesla
- Inventor of the Modern
- By: Richard Munson
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Nikola Tesla, a Serbian immigrant, invented the radio, the induction motor, the neon lamp, and the remote control. Tesla's personal life was magnificently bizarre. Strikingly handsome and impeccably dressed, he was germophobic and never shook hands. He required nine napkins when he sat down to dinner. In later years, he ate only white food and conversed with the pigeons in Bryant Park. This clear, authoritative, and highly enjoyable biography takes account of all phases of this remarkable life.
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Listening Again
- By Thompson on 11-18-19
By: Richard Munson
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Standard Deviations
- Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics
- By: Gary Smith
- Narrated by: Tim Andres Pabon
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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As Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically observed, "If you torture data long enough, it will confess." Lying with statistics is a time-honored con. In Standard Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unaware of the mischief they are committing.
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Now, I can't talk to people.....
- By Andrew Dunbar on 09-28-21
By: Gary Smith
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Shape
- The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else
- By: Jordan Ellenberg
- Narrated by: Jordan Ellenberg
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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If you're like most people, geometry is a dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade. It's plodding through a series of miniscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel. Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face.
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Excellent, but not suited for an audiobook
- By Fred271 on 06-21-21
By: Jordan Ellenberg
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The Grid
- The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future
- By: Gretchen Bakke
- Narrated by: Emily Caudwell
- Length: 11 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.
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A disappointment
- By Ronald on 09-24-16
By: Gretchen Bakke
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To Engineer Is Human
- The Role of Failure in Successful Design
- By: Henry Petroski
- Narrated by: Matthew Boston
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged