Jill Jonnes's narrative history of the war of the currents — the battle between Thomas Edison's direct-current system and George Westinghouse and Nikola Tesla's alternating current — to determine which technology would power the American electrical grid. The book follows the three protagonists through the patent fights, the public-relations campaigns, the financial backing, and the technical decisions that made AC the winner, while also covering the birth of the modern electric-power industry.
Subject of Founders episode #83, this book is a case study in how a founder with the technically superior product (Edison's DC was already deployed and working) can lose to a technology that is actually better at scale. The lesson for founders is that having a working product and an existing customer base does not protect you from disruption — AC won because it could transmit power over long distances at lower cost, and Westinghouse's system was simply a better economic solution for the problem Edison's own early success had defined.
Jonnes also documents how Westinghouse organized his campaign: he found the best engineer (Tesla), backed him aggressively, took the legal fights to Edison's patents, and out-marketed Edison by emphasizing the practical economics of AC. For founders facing an incumbent with a working product, the Westinghouse playbook — find the technical edge, finance it proportionally to the opportunity, and make the economic argument, not just the technological one — is directly applicable.