The Merchant of Power

January 9, 2006
Sam Insull is the forgotten energy tycoon of the early 20th century. As Wasik, a columnist for Bloomberg News, relates, Insull came to America from England in 1881 with $200 in his pocket to be Thomas Edison's private secretary and died in a Paris metro station in 1938 with 84 cents in his pocket. In between, he helped Edison light up New York and moved to Chicago, where he built a corporate empire that raised his personal worth to over $150 million ($1.7 billion in today's dollars); then he lost everything in the Great Depression. The collapse of his companies made him the bête noire of thousands of his now destitute Chicago shareholders and, according to the author, a model for Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.
Wasik notes that Insull was instrumental in two fundamental shifts in American history: first, his innovations in the delivery of electric power made possible the consumer age; second, the failure of his financial empire became a basis for the New Deal laws that now govern much of corporate America. Wasik writes well, and Insull is a complex man whose life and times make worthwhile reading. B&w photos.

February 15, 2006
Samuel Insull (1859 -1938) is hardly a household name, but at the height of his popularity he appeared on the cover of "Time" magazine as the rags-to-riches British-born secretary to Thomas Edison who amassed enormous wealth and power by supplying 32 states with cheap electricity. Veteran consumer journalist Wasik, who has written numerous books on retirement and investment tips, takes a turn at biography by attempting to update distinguished historian Forrest McDonald -s definitive "Insull". Wasik -s sturdy endeavor does not match McDonald -s deft telling of how Insull transformed Edison -s invention into the illumination of millions of homes through a network of electrical power grids and how the ultimate collapse of Insull -s overleveraged position left him broken and bankrupt while ruining the finances of his supporters. Wasik may have taken his cue from current corporate scandals such as Enron and WorldCom in deciding to pluck Insull from semiobscurity, as many of Insull -s contemporaries (including FDR) believed him to be guilty (he was acquitted) of orchestrating the first large-scale corporate deception. An optional purchase for large public and academic libraries." -Peter R. Latusek, Stanford Graduate Sch. of Business Lib., CA"

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