Since Paul is still trying to figure out who he is, that conundrum fits him snugly. The tragedy of some men is not that they are denied, but that they wish they’d loved something else.” At the root lies this observation: “All men get the things they love. For a thriller, this is unusual ground and all the more appealing. Consequently, The Last Days of Night is about the stories people tell themselves and others to justify who they are. Paul realizes that his only chance to win his case or make sense of its Byzantine details lies in creating a potent story to compete with Edison’s. So we have intellectual and economic freedom, as well as the fate of the world, in a sense, the essence of a thriller, the so-called public stakes of a novel. To that end, Edison buys journalists and lawmakers to attack A/C any way he can, twisting the science and engineering involved to sway an ignorant, fearful public. Moreover, if he has his way, the country will be wired only for direct current, a cumbersome, inefficient, and costly system, as opposed to the alternating current Westinghouse favors. No one else must improve on them only he may say how they are to be used and only he may profit.
If it were only money, and very old money at that, nobody reading today would care.īut Edison insists that anything he invented - or says he invented, for the patent filing contains inconsistencies - must occupy a sacrosanct, untouchable position. It’s not just that the damages Edison’s seeking total $1 billion, a sum beyond imagining, especially back then. Indeed, in this crackerjack legal thriller based on real characters and a true story (though certain events are altered or compressed to fit a dramatic timeline), motives are parsed to a hair’s breadth, and pressures mount from all sides.
Cravath, here shown in a 1904 portrait by an unknown photographer, established organizational principles still in use at many prestigious law firms (courtesy Harrison, Mitchell C., ed., Prominent and Progressive Americans, via Wikimedia Commons public domain)
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