The Ghosts of TechBros Past, Present, and Future: From Middle West Utilities to Tesla: how boom-time visions have fragile foundations, or techbro dreams and financial nightmares: Samuel Insull, and to what extent his history is echoing in the career of the person Donald Trump would sometimes call “Elon Tesla”…

Behind the paywall because I am not yet sure to what extent history is rhyming here…

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Born in 1859 to a London temperance hotelkeeper, by the age of 21 Samuel Insull was at the center of the Silicon Valley of the 1880s: he had gained a life-altering position in Menlo Park, New Jersey as the private secretary of Thomas Alva Edison, where he caught the Unwoke Mind Virus that was Edison’s vision of a future of Electrified Humanity.

Moreover, Insull had a genius for organization and management that his then-mentor lacked. In the mid-1880s Edison’s manufacturing operations in Schenectady, New York were foundering. Edison sent Insull at the age of 26 to take charge. Through production and scale economies driven by vertical integration and through very aggressive marketing, by 1992 Insull had successfully transformed a zero-profit enterprise with 200 workers into a massively profitable 6,000-worker industrial juggernaut. And he had had enough of working for others. He left the Edison enpire to lead the then-modest Chicago Edison Electric Company.

Thereafter Insull followed a strategy of technological audacity in the service of pragmatic expansion with the goal of creating and maintaining natural monopolies. Recognizing that electricity’s value lay in ubiquity, he was early to break with Edison’s direct-current approach to champion Tesla and Westinghouse’s alternating-current alternative.

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