A 100 percent WWS energy infrastructure involves electrifying or providing direct heat for all energy sectors and then providing the electricity or heat with WWS. The solution also requires interconnecting geographically dispersed WWS generators on the grid. Because electricity and the grid are such a large part of the solution, understanding how both work is important. This chapter discusses these issues along with the battle between George Westinghouse/Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison to determine whether alternating current (AC) or direct current (DC) would predominate worldwide. Finally, the chapter discusses how transformers, motors, and generators work.

Even before the end of the nineteenth century, Octave Uzanne’s essay “The End of Books” (1894) portrayed the arrival of newer media as the fin of print culture. In this account, books are heavy and slow, newer media are light and liberating, and modern culture is an area of obsolescence and obliteration. A richer consideration of the varieties of print formats and the relationships between print and nonprint media might help us avoid the inclinations that come together in such accounts and their many modern successors. Uzanne’s vision of a post-print culture actually illuminates the late nineteenth century’s cultures of print. A contemporary image of Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s lab offers a more illuminating figure for the relationships between literature, print and nonprint media, and new technology.