Forrest McDonald's 1962 biography of Samuel Insull tells the life of the man who did more than anyone to make electricity a cheap, universal utility, and whose holding-company empire then fell apart spectacularly in the Depression. Born in London in 1859, Insull came to the United States in 1881 as Thomas Edison's private secretary and quickly became one of his most capable managers. In 1892 he took over a small Chicago electric company. McDonald shows how Insull worked out the economics of the modern power industry there: huge central generating stations and ever-larger turbines, pricing that rewarded steady round-the-clock demand, and the push to sell power to streetcars, factories, households and eventually rural areas. He also argued for state regulation of utilities as natural monopolies, partly to protect his own industry from municipal ownership.
The second half of the book traces how Insull financed relentless expansion through layers of holding companies such as Middle West Utilities, selling securities to hundreds of thousands of ordinary customers and investors. When the crash came, the leveraged structure collapsed, wiping out savings across the Midwest. Insull fled to Europe, was extradited, tried for fraud and acquitted, and he became a symbol of the excesses that the New Deal's securities and utility laws were written to curb. McDonald, a historian best known for his work on the founding era, had extensive access to Insull's papers. His account is broadly sympathetic, presenting Insull as a visionary builder undone by financial overreach and political scapegoating. The book reads as a sharp case study in how transformative infrastructure gets built, how it gets financed, and what happens when the money gets ahead of the technology.