THE BOOK
The problem with the electric motor is that it’s too good: simple, clean, durable, quiet and efficient. That’s why car, oil, bus and rubber manufacturers and retailers have fought to get rid of it for so long.
In the 1990s, many of the same greedheads who’d destroyed electric railways launched another campaign to stop electric cars in California. This too is covered in A Streetcar Named Conspire.
General Motors' Alfred Sloan (left) and New York bureaucrat Robert Moses (right) were hyper effective at blasting through freeways and destroying rail transportation. At center is General Motors president Harlow Curtis.
GM’s Alfred Sloan was only half of the Toxic Twins who did the most to vaporize electric railways, ram through freeways and let subways and commuter railroads deteriorate. The other 50% was New York’s Robert Moses (above). Sloan and Moses were from wealthy backgrounds, brilliant, hard-working and disturbingly single-minded. Moses is a major character in A Streetcar Named Conspire. The definitive story of his life is Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker.
GM and National City Lines engineer and executive Marmion Mills was one of Alfred Sloan’s most reliable henchmen.
THE COMPANY
Faraday Books honors Michael Faraday (left, 1791-1867), the London researcher. Many consider this man one of the greatest scientists ever.
Faraday’s discoveries in electricity, magnetism and light were profound, but it took the Scottish mathematician James Maxwell (right, 1831-1879) to put the Englishman’s discoveries into strict formulae which are still used by physicists and engineers.
Did Faraday invent the electric motor? It’s complicated. Other important innovators in this field were the peculiar-but-brilliant (and incredibly prolific) rival to Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), Zenobe Gramme (1826-1901) and Thomas Davenport (1802-1851). All have brief bios in A Streetcar Named Conspire.
