The Men Who Built America

A New Rival Emerges (1x5)

Air date: Nov 18, 2012

The revolt of his workers at the Homestead steelworks and the assassination attempt against his partner, the brutal Henry Frick, brought the king of steel, Andrew Carnegie, to a big challenge. The biggest danger Carnegie faces is called John Pierpont Morgan, then number one in the banking industry, who made his fortune by buying bankrupt businesses. He had the intuition that electricity had a future and, in the 1870s and 1880s, financed the work of Edison, to whom he asked to build power plants to light up New York. But it aims bigger: to provide electricity throughout the country. The invention of alternating current by Tesla, Edison's assistant, in 1884, more reliable than direct current, thwarts his monopoly project and threatens his empire.