In her new book, Jill Jonnes tells the story of the onset of the electrical age, through the lives of three major players: Thomas Edison, creator of the incandescent light bulb; George Westinghouse, an entrepreneur who envisioned a world powered by plentiful, inexpensive electricity; and Nikola Tesla, an inventor who revolutionized the generation and delivery of what some called the "mysterious fluid."

An historian at Johns Hopkins University, Jonnes opens her story in the late 19th century, but moves seamlessly back and forth in time. Period photographs set the tone nicely, and simple illustrations do a better job of explaining how electricity works than anyone who ever attempted the thankless job of teaching me science.

Edison's story has been told before, but just as Benjamin Franklin receives periodic reappraisals, Edison is also worthy of reevaluation. Readers will enjoy the story of the visit actress Sarah Bernhardt paid to his laboratory in December 1880. She alighted from a special train that had whisked her from New York City, where she'd just performed, to Menlo Park, N.J.:

At 2:00 a.m. on December 5, she stepped off the private car and into the raw cold on Menlo Park, thrilled by the soft glow of the incandescent lights lining the plank road. Edison, who showed little interest in women (including his own wife), was smitten by this glorious, vivacious creature in her exquisite French gown with its voluminous, swishing skirts. "She was a terrible 'rubberneck,' " he (her escort, Robert L. Cutting) would later remember. She jumped all over the machinery, and I had one man especially to guard her dress. . . . In the comfortable library, Edison held her hand and explained the secrets of the phonograph. . . .When the great inventor flashed the hundreds of outdoor lights on and off in the pitch dark of the early morning, on and off, on and off, she clapped with pure Gallic delight.

Westinghouse was a great inventor, and an even better industrialist. His story, though, isn't as intriguing as that of the third member of Jonnes' trio, Nikola Tesla.

Tesla, a major inventor and brilliant engineer, had many quirks. "He (silently) counted each step he took as he made his early morning walk down to the Ivry factory. Every activity ideally had to be divisible by three (hence his twenty-seven laps each morning in the Seine). . . . Before eating or drinking anything, he felt obliged to calculate its cubic contents. He deeply disliked shaking hands with anyone."

In addition to such anecdotes, Jonnes' book occasionally provides chilling reading. In describing the initially botched electrocution of a killer in Auburn, N.Y., in 1890, the author puts the reader right there, along with horrified witnesses.

Jonnes is a fine biographer and an excellent scientific and industrial historian. She's done a superb job of telling an important story.

Ed Halloran is a Denver-based author and journalist.